We Should All Write More Love Letters
by Lena Bodenhamer
Love letters: written with gold and sealed with a kiss. Long have love letters been a staple of symbolizing romance; of sappiness; of all-consuming devotion. Whether sent between lovers separated by distance and tribulation or secretly slipped into mailboxes on Valentine’s day, we have all grown accustomed to the mythic magic and grandiose of love letters.
But as I look around, I see that love letters hardly make their mark in modernity. Replaced with quick texts and instagram posts dedicated to significant others’ birthdays and anniversaries, I wonder, are love letters a dying art?
More than 4,000 years ago in the cradle of civilization, verses of flowery language were scrawled across a clay tablet. Now known as the Love Song for Shu-Sin, many consider this tablet to be the first recorded love letter. The tablet reads:
Great is your beauty, sweet as honey.
Lion, beloved of Inanna,
Great is your beauty, sweet as honey.
You have captivated me; let me stand trembling before you.
Even the Old Testament codifies the voice of lovers in The Song of Solomon, showing us that the craft of creating love letters is ancient; it is ingrained in us; biblical, even.
Behold, you are beautiful, my love;
behold, you are beautiful;
your eyes are doves.
Sweeping across time, idols of art, music, and culture too have celebrated their devotion in the form of love letters. Couples have been captured in the timeless celebrity of their romances through the words they so delicately wrote to each other:
Your word travels the entirety of space and reaches my cells which are my stars then goes to yours which are my light.
Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera
I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough.
Franz Kafka to Milena
My mouth hasn't shut up about you since you kissed it. The idea that you may kiss it again is stuck in my brain, which hasn't stopped thinking about you since.
Alex Turner to Alexa Chung
A few days ago I thought I loved you; but since I last saw you I feel I love you a thousand times more.
Napoleon Bonaparte To Joséphine Bonaparte
Looking around at all of your things and your work and going through years of work in my mind, that of all your work, you are still your most beautiful. The most beautiful work of all.
Patti Smith to Robert Mapplethorpe
Surrounded by such epic grandeur and so timeless in their nature, why are love letters uncommon in this age? Why have we stopped writing them? When was the last time you received a love letter, or wrote one? Are love letters a dying art?
It is easy to point to the rise of digital-age quick communication to explain why the art of love letters has declined. Equipped with instant means of reaching loved ones and armed with colloquial slang and emoticons that, at times, replace any need for words, modern communication has watered down the need for expression in writing. Why sit and scrawl an emotionally-charged and vulnerable letter (and wait for it to be delivered) when typing a quick “see you later” or “miss you” only takes seconds? Eerily echoing the sentiment towards quick communication we feel today, William Safire declared in his 1979 speech entitled The Decline of the Written Word that:
“...developing an idea - is not what people want to hear. People prefer short takes, Q and A; the attention span of most Americans on serious matters is about twenty seconds, the length of a television clip. As a result, we're becoming a short-take society… Our food for thought is junk food.”
But, even with the easy excuse of digital-age attitudes towards communication, I think the gradual movement away from the art of love letters runs deeper than preferred syntax. Love letters are more than an artful string of words: they are a physical manifestation of love. A declaration stamped in time: here it is, this love I feel towards you. Love letters Immortalize love; they codify it. Placed in a time characterized with temporary messages, instant gratification, and ever-changing trends, maybe the permanence of love letters is the root of their decline rather than an aversion to the effort they take. In an age where digital messages are often short, colloquialized, and quickly forgotten, does the immortalization of our words scare us? Catherine Field writes in her piece The Fading Art of Letter Writing:
“It is a deliberate act of exposure, a form of vulnerability, because handwriting opens a window on the soul in a way that cyber communication can never do. You savor their arrival and later take care to place them in a box for safe keeping.”
In writing a love letter, or any letter for that matter, we transcribe our soul. We expose ourselves to a vulnerability that cannot be expressed through LOLs and emojis. Which is exactly why, I think, we should all be writing more love letters. Whether to friends, family, or significant others, love letters allow us to feel love deeply. They allow us to make our love immortal.