This Valentine's Day: Send a Love Letter

Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane,
Ain't got time to take a fast train.
Lonely days are gone, I'm a-goin' home,
'Cause my baby just a-wrote me a letter.
---“The Letter,” The Box Tops, 1967

My heart beat faster as I slowly opened the mail box. Was it there? Did she write? Three weeks of anticipation was wearing on me, three weeks of fumbling through the mail, three weeks of mumbling, “That’s not it, not that one, nope, not that one either,” three weeks of closing the mail box, sighing to myself and then hoping for tomorrow. I was about to break under the pressure.

And then it arrived: the letter.

And so began a flurry of love letters between Lori and me. Well, at first they couldn’t be classified as love letters. We weren’t “there” yet. But we would move in that direction. And soon I would write her weekly love letters. I even vowed to continue my practice of writing weekly love letters after we were married.

And I did for a while. But gradually, the weekly flow of love letters trickled into one a month and then dribbled into an occasional note. The Don Juan of love letters collapsed into the reticence of Briscoe Darling’s boys.

It happens. There are kids to raise, bills to pay, laundry to wash, a house to clean, meals to cook---not to mention responsibilities of the day job. And in the midst of all that, Lori and I got connected to the internet, and we learned to text.

With life as busy as it is, it’s so much easier and quicker to text a, “Love you,” or email an, “I was just thinking of you when I read this article I’ve enclosed.” It’s not necessarily that romance has waned, it’s simply more convenient to tweet your sweet, to communicate by email rather than by snail mail, to send an instant message rather that find paper and pen, and struggle with hand writing.

But yet, there is something about getting that handwritten letter and seeing love words written in that color of ink on that particular stationary. Lori still has a letter I wrote her from Bangalore, India over thirty years ago. I can read the writing just now (even then I didn’t properly cross my t’s), and she cherishes a card and letter I sent her when I was a lovesick freshman at Baylor University. How much nicer and neater I wrote back then. Was it because I took more time?

Time, that’s it. It takes time to write love letters. Time---something we seem short on. The express lane of life moves too quickly to slow down for romance.

When I was home several months ago, I read love letters my dad wrote my mom when he was stationed with a medical unit in Korea during that war. Dad filled lonely nights---no television, no internet, no cell phones--- with writing letters to Mom. Those love letters are now sixty something years old, but the faded ink still shines with passion and drips with the longing Dad had for Mom. I carefully handled the fragile, military issued stationary and imagined what kind of pen Dad used when he wrote those letters in some M*A*S*H* like tent on some cold winter’s night, warmed as he must have been by the flame of love.

But it didn’t end in Korea. I also read a more recent love letter of his. “I am so glad we met at the tennis courts some 66 years ago,” Dad wrote. “You still look cute and beautiful to me. And you still have that quality of life that inspires and excites me!!!”

I read where, according to a survey, 2/3 of women ages 18-70, said their most cherished gift on Valentine’s Day wouldn’t be that diamond, that luxurious dinner at a five-star restaurant, that trip to an exotic resort, nor a dozen roses. It would be a letter, a letter!----a signed letter, handwritten by their lover, sealed and delivered by mail.

Did you get that?

So here’s my challenge: Mark out some time, maybe thirty minutes to an hour between now and Valentine’s, get a pen and some paper, go to a place where you can have the quiet to write, and simply tell your lover how much you love him or her. Be specific. Give examples of what your lover does that you admire, and what your lover is and means to you. Make it personal. Write from your heart. The main thing is to do it.

That’s exactly what I am going to do this Valentine’s. I’m going back to the good old fashioned handwritten love letter. Then I’m putting a stamp on it and mailing it.

But please don’t tell Lori. I want to surprise her.

Life Matters is written by David B. Whitlock, Ph.D. His email is drdavid@davidbwhitlock.com and his website is Davidbwhitlock.com.