Woman Writing a Letter. Detail of the painting by Gerard ter Borch, c. 1655.Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshui/Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague
Michael Harris is the author of several books, including Solitude: A Singular Life in a Crowded World and The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection.
None of us know much about love but most of us know this: it’s easier to desire that which is out of reach. So stubborn is that truth that it permeates even the legend of the very first valentine. It was a love poem, they say, written by a 15th-century prince imprisoned in the Tower of London.
We like the story of inaccessible love so much that we won’t let real history get in the way. The prince, Charles d’Orléans, was not, in fact, imprisoned when he wrote his famous poem. He was safe and sound in France. Nor was he writing to a special love but, rather, to a woman “assigned” to be his valentine through an ornate courtly ritual. D’Orléans explicitly rejects her in the poem and protests that he’s too frail for any shenanigans.
So, the legend reflects our blind belief in the supremacy of thwarted romance. It’s conjured by our collective need for pining lovers who struggle to pass each other notes.
Today, we are starved for such starvation.
Any modern love is annotated not by hard-to-send love letters but by easy-to-send glyphs – a suggestive emoji, perhaps, or (dare to dream) a text asking: “you up?” There’s no need for more when the lover in question has already texted you six times that day and shared a photo of their awesome latte.
The problem is not how to reach a potential lover but how to mute them. The majority of those aged 18 to 29 now use dating apps where they swipe at avatars with the lust of online shopping – it’s that rapid-fire and that instinctive. Ultimately, because these are really messaging apps at their core, users end up turning themselves into issuers of scattershot, two-second love letters.
Quantitative changes (the move, say, from one handwritten love letter to a thousand “sup” DMs) eventually have qualitative effects. On dating apps, for example, lovers who are trying to broadcast some signal about their most intimate desires find themselves in a middling space between disconnection and connection. Everywhere online – but on these apps in particular – we live in a shallow middle, never braving the cold of solitude nor the risk of real intimacy.
One app, called Volar, takes all this to the nth degree. It allows two AI-generated avatars to chat amongst themselves, serving as digital stand-ins for their human counterparts. The humans are simply informed after the fact whether the conversation sparkled. In this way, the act of writing love letters may finally boil off into a gas. An unnoticed, algorithmic process will take the labour of literary courtship entirely out of human hands. We begin to believe that our love is defined by online interfaces, that the speed and heartlessness of our technologies are ours as well. But this is a mistake.
A far greater gauge of love, of course, is the care we confer on the objects of our affection. Do we give them our best? Do we give them our full and awestruck attention? Or do we, in the hours when we might describe our love in full, instead grow dull and limited; do we allow our expressive ambitions to be hobbled down to the kind of dopamine-triggering nuggets that attract not a person but a following.
Nobody chooses, of course, to downgrade their affection in this way. Rather, I’m describing a cannibalization of love letters by a larger online experience. All online life is designed by attention merchants (Meta, TikTok, etc.) to be instantly consumable. And any message of love that’s handled by their profit-driven platforms must, therefore, be twisted into a throwaway thing.
Reclaiming the art of writing love letters – on the antique technology of paper – is a small act of defiance, a safeguarding of the self against tech giants that want to package and sell you. It’s a preserving not just of love’s deeper value, but of love’s separation from craven consumer culture.
Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, detail of the painting by Johannes Vermeer, c.1657–1659.Gemäldegalerie, Dresden
What is a love letter, though? What makes it work?
Love letters are self-limiting. Their one-person audience and time-consuming creation are anathema to the twin goals of our time – virality and speed. Yet those limits are also their superpower – they teach us to care. Love letters force us to craft our effusions, to consider, rewrite and hone. We begin to think beyond the emoji world’s unlikely “hearts” and heartless “likes.” Instead, we give our feelings their space, their time and their due.
Next, these careful thoughts are cured in the silent interval between composition and delivery, like paint on a canvas. When we receive a love letter, we receive with it the patina that only a physical object can achieve; we apprehend a romantic reality as opposed to merely being harassed by some flashing sentiment. All the DMs in the world cannot ground us so well as a simple, tactile record of another’s affection.
For much of history we didn’t have to go looking for such a record. Letter writing was for many generations a given – so basic and commonplace that author Simon Garfield, in his book To the Letter, called it “the great discursive template” of our world. But that template has been rusted and chipped by a series of inventions. Samuel Morse sent his first telegraph message in 1844; with wise apprehension, the first note he tapped out read “What hath God wrought?” And God kept wrought-ing: in time we flung ourselves through telephones, pagers, fax machines, e-mails, text messages … Each generation of technology squeezed a little more dopamine from our brains, delighted our drive for social grooming; and merchants learned to harness that chemical reaction, lure us in and commercialize the most intimate corners of human communication.
Until, after years of chatting, swiping, nudging, pinging, maybe the whole idea of writing to each other is at last drying up. Half of women now tell Pew Research that they’ve grown fatigued by dating app messages. And can it really be a coincidence that the first generation to come of age on dating apps are also having far less sex?
We are, in the end, dissatisfied because the equation for human desire includes an element of distance – and distance is the one thing our devices cannot offer. We frown at our buzzing phones and long for a poem from a prisoner in a tower.
We each suspect – even while thumbing out another harried eggplant emoji – that there’s something more we wanted to say, some finer sensibility that we meant to share. We’re sure it’s there, just beyond the glare of all that common, easy messaging. A love letter is the tool we have for revealing that finer sensibility. It’s an old but necessary tool – sure and irreplaceable as a chisel or vise. An unsurpassed means of mapping the depths.
Our messaging platforms feel especially dreary around Valentine’s Day, I think. Not because they fail to deliver but because they deliver too well. We glance away from our phones, hoping distractedly for proof that a person – that one person – has sat down for a stretch of time and cared. How long can we bear to wait before glancing down again?