Love Letters

Old-fashioned? Sure. Welcome? Always.

I have a serious affliction:
loving you forever.
—Richard Feynman

Welcome to February, and with it another Valentine’s Day, one of those mishmash occasions blending old pagan rites with dashes of Christianity, a bit of Disney, and a healthy dose of profiteering. But who can be grumpy about an excuse to celebrate Love, whatever its motives or origins?

When some of us were kids, we suffered the annual humiliation of creating and distributing classroom Valentine’s Day cards. We sweated out the day, noting who got them, who didn’t, who got lots... and who got none. (The obligatory one from the teacher didn’t count.) For many of us, the  exercise was essentially an introduction to the soul-crushing concepts we’d learn lots more about as adults. The only good part was that the actual writing was easy—really easy. You could spend most of your time cutting and gluing and glittering up the art—fun!—but the words were already written for you: “Be My Valentine?” You cut out your hearts, dashed off those three words, got the damn things delivered, and went home with a handful of those little heart-shaped candies with the weird slogans on them.

And now, as an adult, you’ve decided you want to write a grown-up love letter. But a little flashback residue lingers, and you’re wondering what to say besides that “be my Valentine” bit. And, if you’re writing to someone not already your Valentine, you’re maybe a little scared.

A plethora of sites offer advice on writing love letters, both to current and potential lovers. I like A Conscious Rethink, which admonishes us, first, to be “honest, sincere, and unguarded.” Aside from occasional qualifications on that last point, I think this is pretty good advice for how to live your life in general.

Honest and sincere. Crucial, but hard to do (humans are good at lying, especially to ourselves). That last one, though, “unguarded.” That’s the daunting one, right? But I think it’s just as critical, and the Internet seems to agree with me, because being willing to reveal your soft belly while writing a love letter turns up elsewhere in searches, as with Mind, Body, Green: “Be willing to be vulnerable.”

As to the actual mechanics, they can be pretty straightforward:

Begin with a warm greeting, perhaps citing a pet name.

Tell them why you’re writing the letter, even if—à la that greatest of love scribes Stevie Wonder—it’s just to say I Love You. In fact, I’d posit that this is the best reason to write one. You don’t even have to do it on Valentine’s Day. Put a note on your calendar to write one on, oh, August 2, say.  

Tell them why you love them, and aim for specificity. (Not “you have such beautiful hair” but “there’s this thing your hair does where it makes a partial curl around your right ear that is adorable, especially when you try to fix it and it bounces right back.”)

Tell a story, again ideally something specific. (“It was raining when we met, and you’d forgotten your umbrella. One of your socks was saturated and schmushed down and stuck to your ankle, but, weirdly, your other sock was bone dry. You didn’t seem to miss the umbrella at all; in fact, you were laughing. I used to hate the rain, but since that day I adore it.”)

Finally, close quickly—a sentence summing up what you’ve just said can do the job. “I look forward to a lifetime of rainy days with you.”

You can shake up the order above; maybe you will find it easier to open with the story and then move onto the “why.” Or skip the why altogether and talk more about how you went from point A to point Z, here, today, sitting here writing this love letter.

If even the thought of the project overwhelms, try sneaking into it. Tell yourself you’ll just set your phone timer thingy to 10 minutes, and maybe just write the lyrics to that Stevie Wonder song and then see what happens next. Ten minutes! You can stand anything for 10 minutes—you probably spend three times that much time clucking over the latest electronic Gawdawful News of the Day.

You probably will discover that once you begin, that 10 minutes will fly by. (Hint: It’s OK to hit “restart” if/when the timer goes off and you’ve only just finally gotten on a roll.)

If you must, you can find a ton of templates online (Write Express, for example). But I think that’s a copout. In the end, writing a love letter isn’t just for the recipient. It’s for the sender, too. By taking the time to find a stronger verb, turn an artist’s gaze onto your relationship, dig up a fresh revelation about your adored one (who is, after all, the only person in the entire multiverse who is that particular person), you are learning things about yourself that you didn’t realize you didn’t know.

Maybe what you learn is just that you hate writing love letters. (And why is that?) Maybe you get curious about why this word worked and that one didn’t, and decide you need to read poetry for a while. Maybe you wonder why raindrops come in different sizes, and decide to be a meteorologist.

Or if nothing else comes of it, maybe a whole morning passes without you taking a single peek, not even once, at your Gawdawful News of the Day app. Wouldn’t that be nice?

I can guarantee, at least in my house, that that accomplishment alone would be the best Valentine’s gift you could possibly give your loved one—and yourself.

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Lagniappe: It seems to me (a rank newcomer to scifi and fantasy) that Becky Chambers reveals an inordinate amount of love for, well, everything, including her fellow species—even as her books explore lives in the aftermath of stupid human destruction. Her love is moored not in story but in landscapes of tenderness, fear, cruelty, intelligence, and grace. And actual landscapes, too: detailed forests and wetlands and cityscapes I sigh into contentedly. Chambers can do Plot, but sometimes opts instead to indulge her imagination, playing it out through the interactions and curiosities of her invented creatures living their lives in their equally imaginative environments. “Character-driven” is the industry term for it, I guess. Her slender plots might bore some, but I’m finding them addictive. Her Wayfarers series was my gateway drug, a trilogy that includes a middle book that I can’t stop thinking about in which nothing and everything happens. Right on its heels were my sixth and seventh: A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is a sequel to A Psalm for the Wild-Built, both novellas. (All her books share one quality: fantastic titles.)