Love Letter - The Modern Love Letter

The Modern Love Letter

The love letter continued to flourish in the first half of the twentieth-century - F Scott Fitzgerald gives us a Flapper 'absorbed in composing one of those non-committal, marvellously elusive letters that only a young girl can write' - and may even have been encouraged by the then prevalence of global war. Before the wide use of telecommunications, letters were one of the few ways for a couple to remain in contact, particularly in wartime: when one of them was posted or stationed some distance from the other, the "being apart" often intensified emotions. Sometimes a desired normal communication could lead to a letter expressing love, longing and desires: 'the very act of writing often triggers love feelings in the writer'. During these times, "love letters" were the only means of communication, and soldiers even swapped addresses of desirable young ladies so that an initial communication and possible start of a relationship could be initiated. On the downside, when a correspondence was delayed, 'our move, the secrecy, the battle...it could be explained, but no explanation soothed my worry'; yet when letters came, operational contingencies might mean the need to 'Fold the letter carefully away...Fold that whole world away, and passion and love, so that they couldn't be hurt; yet of course they were there...when I saw a man, any man, reading a letter'.

In the second half of the century, with the coming of the Permissive society - 'imprisoning in physical bonding' - and the instantaneity of the Information Age, the more distanced and nuanced art of the love letter might be said to have fallen somewhat into disrepute: 'what could be more tradition-bound than a woman's (heterosexual) love letter?'. A couple might instead ironically separate with the exchange, '"You should have said - I'll write." "But we won't." "No, but let's preserve the forms, the forms at least..."'.

Even in the electronic age, however, the humble love letter may possibly still play its part in life, if in new formats (exemplified perhaps in You've Got Mail); and 'on the internet, one can find numerous sites where people obtain advice on how to write a love letter'. Sometimes letters are preferable to face-to-face contact because they can be written as the thoughts come to the author's mind. This may allow feelings to be more easily expressed than if the writer were in the beloved's presence. Further, expressing strong emotional feelings to paper or some other permanent form can be an expression within itself of desire and the importance of the beloved and the lover's emotions. Perhaps any 'correspondence is a kind of love affair...tinged by a subtle but palpable eroticism'; while by contrast, in mobile, Twitter or Tweet, 'telegraphese was infectious', and the sign-off '"LOL! B cool B N touch bye"...felt like having a disinterested young mother'.

The expression of feelings may be made to an existing love or in the hope of establishing a new relationship; and the increasing rarity and consequent emotional charm of personal mail may also serve to emphasize the emotional importance of the message.