The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Dearest One,
Happy Valentine’s Day. Instead of roses or a fattening box of chocolates, we’re offering something much more heartfelt this year. A love letter written to you, the Traditional Love Letter.
Don’t cry, our beloved. Not even tears of joy. Time, distance and those cheap floozies, Twitter and Facebook, may have kept us apart for lo these many years. Yet your special beauty is the stuff of legend. We’d hate to think of anything dimming your luster, least of all our, um, inattentiveness of late.
Inattentiveness? Talk about taking poetic license when it comes to understatement ...
“The love letter died a long time ago,” proclaims Michael Fiore. “Our ability to communicate with each other whenever we want to has gotten so much easier now, that accessibility tends to breed contempt for the old way of doing things.”
Contempt? Old?! Sigh. That’s no way for a gentleman to talk, Traditional Love Letter. So allow us to defend your honor by pointing out that, as creator of the website TextTheRomanceBack.com, Fiore advises people on sending text messages guaranteed to put more romantic oomph into their relationships. You can even sign up to have him — shudder! — e-mail you tips on a regular basis.
In other words, he’s got a digital dog in this fight.
Of course, he’s also got a legitimate point.
The amount of first-class mail handled by the U.S. Postal Service declined a whopping 29 percent from 1998 to 2008. Needless to say, those weren’t all love letters that went missing. Nor did people stop “writing” to each other entirely. Via e-mail, instant messages and so many other nearly instantaneous forms of electronic communication, they now pretty much know everything there is to know about everyone and everything all the time.
Everything, perhaps, except how to write an actual letter.
“We have found it is appropriate for everyone,” Debra Lassiter of Perfectly Polished: The Etiquette School said of the “how to” writing session included in the school’s courses in Athens and metro Atlanta. “Because of texting and because of cell phones, they do struggle with more traditional writing.”
If so, then most people must really struggle when it comes to writing something as personal and potentially ego-imperiling as a love letter.
Or not writing one, as increasingly seems to be the case.
‘Such a loss’
Samara O’Shea is a professional letter writer in Philadelphia. In the past five years she’s created about 50 love letters for strangers who either want to “turn it up a notch” on their own halfhearted efforts, or can’t even find a notch to begin with.
“We’re losing our ability to communicate effectively in writing because we’re losing the language itself,” O’Shea said. “There are roughly 600,000 words in the English language, and so many are going untouched now that it keeps shrinking and shrinking into acronyms and emoticons.”
Here in Atlanta, Karen Rogers-Robinson is dating a man who has never even talked to her on the phone, let alone written to her. Instead, he texts her four to five times a day. Although she appreciates the attention, she laments the fact that at age 43, she may never again receive a traditional love letter.
“It’s all texting and Facebook and abbreviated words that you have to struggle to make out the meaning of,” said Rogers-Robinson, who, somewhat ironically, runs a company that develops mobile-media solutions primarily for small businesses. “It’s such a loss. How can you truly express your love in 140 characters or less?”
How indeed, Traditional Love Letter. (May we call you TLL?) We could spend a thousand years extolling your many wondrous qualities and never run out of material, nor quite do you justice. There’s your inner beauty for starters: So many gorgeous adjectives, so much glorious imagery! Nor are we immune to your hand-addressed outer beauty. There’s something almost magical about the way you simply turn up in the mailbox one day to confirm, at length and surely until the end of time, that someone indeed worships us.
“It built up more anticipation and more excitement, and more dread, too,” suggested Cavanaugh Lee, 33, likening the ritual to waiting for a college letter of acceptance to arrive in the mail — before that all went electronic, too.
“You had to wait and go through that whole process of wondering, and then you got it and you could take it in and really enjoy it for awhile because you wouldn’t get anything else for weeks. Now we have ‘moments’ every five minutes, and then we forget about them in the rush to get to the next moment.”
Tweets, drafts, apps
When it comes to communicating romantically, Lee is torn between two lovers, in a sense. On the one hand, she still has, tucked away in a drawer, a handwritten love letter she received about four years ago. “The fact that he actually took the time to sit down and write it” never fails to warm her heart, she said, even though the relationship didn’t work out.
On the other hand, her new novel, “Save as Draft,” is a set-in-Atlanta romantic comedy told entirely through e-mails, text messages, tweets and other forms of electronic communication. Written in 2009 when Lee worked here as a lawyer at Alston & Bird, the funny, semi-autobiographical novel pretty much drives a 3G stake through the lacy heart of the traditional love letter.
But that doesn’t mean they’ve gone away entirely, Lee said.
Indeed, one of the book’s characters describes his dream woman in an e-mail to a female friend, who just happens to possess all those same qualities; then he saves it as a draft for weeks until he builds up the nerve to instantly proclaim his love by moving the e-mail out of draft status.
“Oh, yeah, love letters definitely still exist,” said Lee, now a federal prosecutor for the U.S. attorney’s office in Savannah. “The only thing is, you have to hit the ‘send’ key.”
Ah, would that it were only that one thing, most beloved Traditional Love Letter! In fact, cheap and easy temptations for our message-conveying affections abound these days, ranging from the sweet (Godiva hearts “inscribed” with the word “Love” on their chocolatey surface) to the slightly silly ( romance novels with your Valentine’s name written into the plot, from YourNovel.com).
And then there’s what can only be described as — cover your eyes, dearest — a “quickie”: A new smart phone app, “Kiss My Valentine,” allows the user to program “digital kisses, hugs and wishes ... to be delivered to those in the App user’s contact book,” according to its maker, Iconosys Inc.
Seeking ‘butterflies’
Isn’t that romantic? Maybe the better question is, are any of these new versions of the traditional love letter worthy suitors?
Without a doubt, says TextTheRomanceBack .com’s Fiore.
“The immediacy of a text lets love or romance intrude into your immediate day,” said the self-proclaimed “romance coach.” Fiore even sees “a certain beauty” to the fact that, unlike a ribbon-tied stash of traditional love letters, even the most romantic text tends to disappear rather quickly.
“I try to teach people to be in the moment,” he said. “The mistake people make in relationships in general is not staying in the present and constantly thinking about the future. What about right now? What’s better than a romantic text to keep us in the ‘right now?’ ”
Such a sweet talker. Is it any wonder we sometimes find ourselves looking a bit longingly in that direction, dearest Traditional Love Letter? In the end, though, we always come back to you.
Karen Rogers-Robinson’s husband died nine years ago, but she still has the love letters and cards he sent her during their courtship and marriage. Although she has moved on personally and professionally — even blogging as the Social Media Mobile Media Marketing Diva on the website of her company, Onyx Mobile Marketing — she’s still moved by what she occasionally re-reads.
“The two or three text messages he ever sent me are long gone, but I’m blessed to have those letters,” said Rogers-Robinson, the mother of two grown sons. “I think about when I was a younger woman and I dated my husband and got to hold his hand and I waited for the butterflies to come.
“I don’t get butterflies from a text.”
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