Ask people if they've ever received one and you'll know the answer by the way their face softens. Love letters arrive from the Land of Love. They're written with courage: here's my heart, my whole heart, and I'm so in love with you I'm gong to write it all down and then, of all things, I'm going to put it in an envelope and mail it to you.
Do people still write romantic love letters? Have electronic messages closed the distance, erased the problems of absence and physical space and made the private and unreserved but careful language of love letters out dated? I don't thing so. I think people still write them, but they are rare. We're busy, maybe even prefer messages that are in the public domain. Maybe this is good. Suddenly I'm unsure of myself and herein lies another of the charms of a genuine love letter: the writer is simultaneously so bold and so uncertain.
A love letter is supremely personal and unique. It is a hand written dream that takes time to prepare. It isn't some sort of bread and butter, the weather's fine, shopping list kind of memo somebody fires off at random: La, la, la. Got cheese, washed the dog. No! And no, no, no. A love letter is not typed! What? You're going to send a love letter to someone you're over the moon in love with and leave the impression there are copies?
I suppose if a person was really over the edge in love, they'd also compose a poem that would flow out of their pen like Elizabeth Barrett Browning's, How Do I love Thee Let Me Count The Ways, and it would be on thick, creamy paper. You'd probably have to be not much more than 17 years old to write that intensely or 24 at the most, wouldn't you?
Or maybe the person could burst into song like the movies. But songs aren't love letters. A person can express their love in a song but it's destined for a wide audience. The magic of a love letter is that you can touch it, smell it, hold it, cart it around and read it a million times a day and put it under your pillow.
Sending a love letter is a very rash thing to do. What if this piece of a person's heart is lost in transit, or intercepted, or misinterpreted, or, worse, (could anything be more heartbreaking?) returned?
And then, (Oh the pain!), what does one do with love letters if everything doesn't work out and the love letters mustn't be kept? Oh the agony of it all. Hush. Here's an idea. One could tear the letters into a million teeny tiny pieces. Or, maybe, burn them. But you'd have to be extremely crushed to burn a love letter. Nevertheless, if you did decide to tear up a love letter, there would still be the teeniest, tiniest possibility you could still, somehow, put the pieces back together if, at the last moment, you couldn't possibly part with the letters or the person who wrote them.Note: Elizabeth Barret Browning wrote How Do I Love Thee in 1845 when she was closer to 40 than 20 years old, and she and her husband, Robert Browning, who also wrote marvelous romantic poetry, exchanged hundreds of love letters.
