Say It With Txt
Digital Love Letters Are Easy to Send But Hard to Cherish
By JEFFREY ZASLOW
February 9, 2007; The Wall Street Journal
Here's how love letters are written, circa 2007.
A few weeks ago, Christopher Anthony was on a plane about to take off from Los Angeles. He began tapping out a cellphone text message to his girlfriend, Stacie Harb: "I love you, beautiful... Thank you for everything you do for me/us..."
A flight attendant firmly told him to turn off his phone, but he couldn't stop. "I need a kiss. I need your lips..." As the plane reached the runway, the 26-year-old banking executive tapped his final thoughts: "I just need you. Bye lover." He hit "send" and then the plane took off for Paris.
Ms. Harb now keeps his 37-word declaration in her phone's saved messages. "It was perfect -- short and sweet," she says. "It's not some drawn-out, 10-page letter professing his undying love. That would be creepy."
Love letters aren't what they used to be. While young correspondents have committed their deepest feelings to paper for centuries, the latest generation of lovers is coming of age along with new technologies that let them court each other on the run. The passionate essays penned on Valentine's Days past have morphed into bursts of instant-message affection. Confessions once sealed in envelopes are now dashed off in email. While romantics have bemoaned the end of the love letter for decades, the latest generation of amorous Americans is turning the language of love into shorthand.
The medium and message aren't the only things changing. As love notes go electronic, they can also go public -- posted online, or forwarded mockingly to thousands. Romantics with an exhibitionist streak post their missives online at sites like CollectiveExperience.org, where the tongue-tied can cut and paste just the right sentiment. Social networking sites offer shortcuts, too: At eCrush.com, a site for teens and young adults, some 2.4 million registered users communicate through prewritten lines that appear via drop-down screens. Popular choices include "OMG! You're so hot," "If looks could kill, you'd be a weapon of mass destruction" and "Your body is a wonderland, and I wanna be Alice."
The immediacy of high-tech love letters can be exhilarating; there's no waiting for a ship to cross an ocean with news that someone finds you irresistible. However, while older generations have treasured handwritten love letters wrapped in ribbons, many of today's young romantics will end up with little tangible proof that anyone ever cared about them. Unsaved emails disappear. Text messages are gone forever if a cellphone breaks or gets lost.
The implications are so stark that the federal government is now asking soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and especially their girlfriends, boyfriends and spouses back home -- to print out loving emails. If they don't, future historians and soldiers' offspring will have fewer insights into what love was like in this war. "We encourage everyone: The minute you get an email from a soldier overseas, print it and put it in a file," says Andrew Carroll of Operation Homecoming, the National Endowment for the Arts project that preserves war correspondences.
Of course, a lot of young people swear by the high-tech approach. Shelley Fulghum, a 25-year-old event planner in Atlanta, cites the portability factor. "I'm not going to carry a stack of love letters in my purse," she says. "But it's easy to save my boyfriend's text messages on my cell, and I can look at them whenever I need to cheer up."
Ms. Fulghum also has a backup: In the past two years, she has typed about 250 messages -- from a previous boyfriend and from her current one -- into a file on her home computer to save them for posterity. ("I hope you're missing me as much as I'm missing you. I can't wait to see you tomorrow. I love you," read one.) The archive came in handy when her phone froze up and her saved text messages were lost. She was sad, however, because she wouldn't be able to view them on her phone. "I cried," she says. "When I'd travel, looking at them gave me a sense of peace."
Today's love letters mirror other societal changes, too. Words of affection were once almost exclusively private exchanges between two smitten souls; letters were "sealed with a kiss" and "for your eyes only." Today, love is often far less personal -- a reflection of the cravings in our culture for widespread attention. Millions of expressions of devotion, as well as confessions about unrequited love, are posted publicly on MySpace and Facebook. Given all the love poems, pickup lines and profundities available on the Internet, plagiarism is easier than ever.
Just Cut and Paste
"All you have to do is cut and paste," says Monica Hernandez, an 18-year-old student at Wayne State University in Detroit. "I once sent a poem to my boyfriend that I found on the Internet. I told him I wrote it and it came straight from the heart. He believed me."
Teens and twentysomethings need the constant back-and-forth messaging, says Jason Ryan Dorsey, a 28-year-old corporate speaker and author who bills himself as "a generational liaison." "Many people in my generation have a hunger for instant gratification," he says. "We write it down. We send it out. We get the reply. We want to know where we stand in a relationship right now."
For help interpreting their love lives, some people routinely forward suitors' emails so friends and family can weigh in. "People wouldn't take a handwritten love letter to Kinko's, make 50 copies, and then mail them to all their friends," says Asia Wong, a New Orleans artist. "But with email, you can just hit forward and there you go." For an art project on her Web site, sleeptrip.com, Ms. Wong posted hundreds of love letters she'd written to various people in her life.
Such public displays of affection -- especially forwarded emails -- can lead to massive mortification. In London last year, 37-year-old Joseph Dobbie courted a woman by writing a flowery email, with lines such as "your smile is the freshest of my special memories." The woman forwarded the email to her sister, who sent it to her friends, who sent it to their friends. As the email kept getting forwarded, Mr. Dobbie ended up being mocked world-wide.
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/images … 192740.gif
Mr. Dobbie, reached in Slough, England, says that for a while afterward, women "were hurling themselves verbally at me by email." He wasn't sure which ones were genuine and which were just making fun of his prose, and no romances resulted. He has had no contact with the woman he originally tried to woo, but vows that the episode won't stop his gushy tendencies. Should he ever meet the right woman, he says, he'll have no qualms about sending her long, romantic emails.
He is saddened that in a text-message culture, many young men show little interest in the language of love. "My father is a terribly masculine, enormously rugged individual," says Mr. Dobbie. "He was an offshore oil-rig diver. But he wrote my mom poetry. If I want a relationship with somebody, I believe that person is worth more than a text message."
One woman who read Mr. Dobbie's forwarded email was Karen Loofs, a government employee in Ottawa, Canada. She felt sorry that Mr. Dobbie was being ridiculed, but also thought his email deserved derision because it was filled with "red flags of narcissism" -- the words "I," "me" and "my."
Ms. Loofs, 43 and never married, has had her share of serious relationships. Up until about 10 years ago, boyfriends traded handwritten letters with her. She once dated a writer who sent her 30-page love letters. Another boyfriend scented his in aftershave. "I made the mistake of telling him I liked it," she says. "So I'd get letters that were drenched."
In her late 30s, she had a boyfriend in his early 20s. That's when the sweet nothings started coming by email -- with "nothing" being the operative word. Her young boyfriend's messages were lazily written and filled with typos: "Your intellec impresses me and excits me." Another contained just three letters: "I L U." "I appreciated that he had feelings," says Ms. Loofs. "I just didn't really know what they were."
People have been wringing their hands over the alleged demise of the love letter for nearly a century. In the 1920s, there were fears that suitors would no longer have to woo their dream girls with their writings, when it was easier to just phone it in. The love letter survived. By the 1990s, though email had led to a resurgence of written correspondence, the number of people actually putting pen to paper had severely diminished.
Though people of all ages still send traditional paper Valentine's Day cards -- 190 million are expected to be sold this year in the U.S. -- about half of all greeting-card buyers say they do so mostly because they feel obliged, according to a 2005 study by marketing consultant Unity Marketing Inc. This year, 14 million e-Valentines are expected to be sold, according to the Greeting Card Association; the trade group is tracking e-cards for the first time this year.
Chaim Sigler, 22, is still finding his way to the mailbox. He lives in Detroit and his girlfriend, Aliza Becker, 20, lives in Chicago. Each Tuesday, he mails her a love letter or poem he's written for her. His friends laugh at him for resisting email. "I'm an old-school romantic," he says. Ms. Becker doesn't use the U.S. mail to reply to him. Instead, she sends long text messages to his phone. "I love getting letters in the mail," Mr. Sigler says. "But if she wants to do it by text, that's fine."
The decline in handwritten missives is matched by an uptick in prepackaged sentiments. Laura Corn's best-selling book "52 Invitations to Grrreat Sex" allows lovers to present each other with detachable, sealed invitations, each one with creatively crafted wording too steamy to reprint here. Meanwhile, candy company Mars Inc. is inviting customers to print personalized love letters on pieces of M&M's ($48 for four 7-ounce bags). Talk about short and sweet: The sentiment can't exceed 16 characters.
'You Sexy Girl'
Over lunch recently on the Wayne State campus, Ms. Hernandez and four friends said they yearned for a return to old-fashioned romance. All of them are young women with boyfriends, but only one of them has ever received a handwritten love letter. Jackie Navarro, 18, said she once wrote one to her boyfriend. "But he wouldn't take the time to read it. He wanted me to read it to him." Ms. Hernandez said she has asked her boyfriend to write her love letters. "He told me, 'Yeah, right!' He'd rather just text message me 'You sexy girl.'"
Such texting -- "sext messaging," some call it -- can be exciting. But in the end, some find any kind of texting unfulfilling. In Los Angeles, Courtney Cohen, 28, dated a man for the past seven months and got a handful of somewhat romantic text messages from him. She says she savored them, even though they said little more than "I miss you sweetie." She's sadly aware that such minimal messages won't stand the test of time. That's why she envies her parents. "I found all the love letters they wrote to each other when they were dating in the late sixties," she says. "They were so sweet."
Ms. Cohen, who runs an online antiques store, started a file of the handwritten messages she got from her boyfriend. As of last week, it had just two items in it: a birthday card on which he'd signed only his name, and the flight itinerary for a trip they took together to San Francisco, on which he had written "Get ready for San Francisco!" For Ms. Cohen, there was potential sentimental value in that itinerary because it showed enthusiasm. "It had an exclamation point," she says.
The couple broke up last month.
� Email Jeffrey.Zaslow@wsj.com about your love letters. Selected comments will be available at WSJ.com/OnlineToday on Valentine's Day.
Digital Love Letters Are Easy to Send But Hard to Cherish
By JEFFREY ZASLOW
February 9, 2007; The Wall Street Journal
Here's how love letters are written, circa 2007.
A few weeks ago, Christopher Anthony was on a plane about to take off from Los Angeles. He began tapping out a cellphone text message to his girlfriend, Stacie Harb: "I love you, beautiful... Thank you for everything you do for me/us..."
A flight attendant firmly told him to turn off his phone, but he couldn't stop. "I need a kiss. I need your lips..." As the plane reached the runway, the 26-year-old banking executive tapped his final thoughts: "I just need you. Bye lover." He hit "send" and then the plane took off for Paris.
Ms. Harb now keeps his 37-word declaration in her phone's saved messages. "It was perfect -- short and sweet," she says. "It's not some drawn-out, 10-page letter professing his undying love. That would be creepy."
Love letters aren't what they used to be. While young correspondents have committed their deepest feelings to paper for centuries, the latest generation of lovers is coming of age along with new technologies that let them court each other on the run. The passionate essays penned on Valentine's Days past have morphed into bursts of instant-message affection. Confessions once sealed in envelopes are now dashed off in email. While romantics have bemoaned the end of the love letter for decades, the latest generation of amorous Americans is turning the language of love into shorthand.
The medium and message aren't the only things changing. As love notes go electronic, they can also go public -- posted online, or forwarded mockingly to thousands. Romantics with an exhibitionist streak post their missives online at sites like CollectiveExperience.org, where the tongue-tied can cut and paste just the right sentiment. Social networking sites offer shortcuts, too: At eCrush.com, a site for teens and young adults, some 2.4 million registered users communicate through prewritten lines that appear via drop-down screens. Popular choices include "OMG! You're so hot," "If looks could kill, you'd be a weapon of mass destruction" and "Your body is a wonderland, and I wanna be Alice."
The immediacy of high-tech love letters can be exhilarating; there's no waiting for a ship to cross an ocean with news that someone finds you irresistible. However, while older generations have treasured handwritten love letters wrapped in ribbons, many of today's young romantics will end up with little tangible proof that anyone ever cared about them. Unsaved emails disappear. Text messages are gone forever if a cellphone breaks or gets lost.
The implications are so stark that the federal government is now asking soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and especially their girlfriends, boyfriends and spouses back home -- to print out loving emails. If they don't, future historians and soldiers' offspring will have fewer insights into what love was like in this war. "We encourage everyone: The minute you get an email from a soldier overseas, print it and put it in a file," says Andrew Carroll of Operation Homecoming, the National Endowment for the Arts project that preserves war correspondences.
Of course, a lot of young people swear by the high-tech approach. Shelley Fulghum, a 25-year-old event planner in Atlanta, cites the portability factor. "I'm not going to carry a stack of love letters in my purse," she says. "But it's easy to save my boyfriend's text messages on my cell, and I can look at them whenever I need to cheer up."
Ms. Fulghum also has a backup: In the past two years, she has typed about 250 messages -- from a previous boyfriend and from her current one -- into a file on her home computer to save them for posterity. ("I hope you're missing me as much as I'm missing you. I can't wait to see you tomorrow. I love you," read one.) The archive came in handy when her phone froze up and her saved text messages were lost. She was sad, however, because she wouldn't be able to view them on her phone. "I cried," she says. "When I'd travel, looking at them gave me a sense of peace."
Today's love letters mirror other societal changes, too. Words of affection were once almost exclusively private exchanges between two smitten souls; letters were "sealed with a kiss" and "for your eyes only." Today, love is often far less personal -- a reflection of the cravings in our culture for widespread attention. Millions of expressions of devotion, as well as confessions about unrequited love, are posted publicly on MySpace and Facebook. Given all the love poems, pickup lines and profundities available on the Internet, plagiarism is easier than ever.
Just Cut and Paste
"All you have to do is cut and paste," says Monica Hernandez, an 18-year-old student at Wayne State University in Detroit. "I once sent a poem to my boyfriend that I found on the Internet. I told him I wrote it and it came straight from the heart. He believed me."
Teens and twentysomethings need the constant back-and-forth messaging, says Jason Ryan Dorsey, a 28-year-old corporate speaker and author who bills himself as "a generational liaison." "Many people in my generation have a hunger for instant gratification," he says. "We write it down. We send it out. We get the reply. We want to know where we stand in a relationship right now."
For help interpreting their love lives, some people routinely forward suitors' emails so friends and family can weigh in. "People wouldn't take a handwritten love letter to Kinko's, make 50 copies, and then mail them to all their friends," says Asia Wong, a New Orleans artist. "But with email, you can just hit forward and there you go." For an art project on her Web site, sleeptrip.com, Ms. Wong posted hundreds of love letters she'd written to various people in her life.
Such public displays of affection -- especially forwarded emails -- can lead to massive mortification. In London last year, 37-year-old Joseph Dobbie courted a woman by writing a flowery email, with lines such as "your smile is the freshest of my special memories." The woman forwarded the email to her sister, who sent it to her friends, who sent it to their friends. As the email kept getting forwarded, Mr. Dobbie ended up being mocked world-wide.
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/images … 192740.gif
Mr. Dobbie, reached in Slough, England, says that for a while afterward, women "were hurling themselves verbally at me by email." He wasn't sure which ones were genuine and which were just making fun of his prose, and no romances resulted. He has had no contact with the woman he originally tried to woo, but vows that the episode won't stop his gushy tendencies. Should he ever meet the right woman, he says, he'll have no qualms about sending her long, romantic emails.
He is saddened that in a text-message culture, many young men show little interest in the language of love. "My father is a terribly masculine, enormously rugged individual," says Mr. Dobbie. "He was an offshore oil-rig diver. But he wrote my mom poetry. If I want a relationship with somebody, I believe that person is worth more than a text message."
One woman who read Mr. Dobbie's forwarded email was Karen Loofs, a government employee in Ottawa, Canada. She felt sorry that Mr. Dobbie was being ridiculed, but also thought his email deserved derision because it was filled with "red flags of narcissism" -- the words "I," "me" and "my."
Ms. Loofs, 43 and never married, has had her share of serious relationships. Up until about 10 years ago, boyfriends traded handwritten letters with her. She once dated a writer who sent her 30-page love letters. Another boyfriend scented his in aftershave. "I made the mistake of telling him I liked it," she says. "So I'd get letters that were drenched."
In her late 30s, she had a boyfriend in his early 20s. That's when the sweet nothings started coming by email -- with "nothing" being the operative word. Her young boyfriend's messages were lazily written and filled with typos: "Your intellec impresses me and excits me." Another contained just three letters: "I L U." "I appreciated that he had feelings," says Ms. Loofs. "I just didn't really know what they were."
People have been wringing their hands over the alleged demise of the love letter for nearly a century. In the 1920s, there were fears that suitors would no longer have to woo their dream girls with their writings, when it was easier to just phone it in. The love letter survived. By the 1990s, though email had led to a resurgence of written correspondence, the number of people actually putting pen to paper had severely diminished.
Though people of all ages still send traditional paper Valentine's Day cards -- 190 million are expected to be sold this year in the U.S. -- about half of all greeting-card buyers say they do so mostly because they feel obliged, according to a 2005 study by marketing consultant Unity Marketing Inc. This year, 14 million e-Valentines are expected to be sold, according to the Greeting Card Association; the trade group is tracking e-cards for the first time this year.
Chaim Sigler, 22, is still finding his way to the mailbox. He lives in Detroit and his girlfriend, Aliza Becker, 20, lives in Chicago. Each Tuesday, he mails her a love letter or poem he's written for her. His friends laugh at him for resisting email. "I'm an old-school romantic," he says. Ms. Becker doesn't use the U.S. mail to reply to him. Instead, she sends long text messages to his phone. "I love getting letters in the mail," Mr. Sigler says. "But if she wants to do it by text, that's fine."
The decline in handwritten missives is matched by an uptick in prepackaged sentiments. Laura Corn's best-selling book "52 Invitations to Grrreat Sex" allows lovers to present each other with detachable, sealed invitations, each one with creatively crafted wording too steamy to reprint here. Meanwhile, candy company Mars Inc. is inviting customers to print personalized love letters on pieces of M&M's ($48 for four 7-ounce bags). Talk about short and sweet: The sentiment can't exceed 16 characters.
'You Sexy Girl'
Over lunch recently on the Wayne State campus, Ms. Hernandez and four friends said they yearned for a return to old-fashioned romance. All of them are young women with boyfriends, but only one of them has ever received a handwritten love letter. Jackie Navarro, 18, said she once wrote one to her boyfriend. "But he wouldn't take the time to read it. He wanted me to read it to him." Ms. Hernandez said she has asked her boyfriend to write her love letters. "He told me, 'Yeah, right!' He'd rather just text message me 'You sexy girl.'"
Such texting -- "sext messaging," some call it -- can be exciting. But in the end, some find any kind of texting unfulfilling. In Los Angeles, Courtney Cohen, 28, dated a man for the past seven months and got a handful of somewhat romantic text messages from him. She says she savored them, even though they said little more than "I miss you sweetie." She's sadly aware that such minimal messages won't stand the test of time. That's why she envies her parents. "I found all the love letters they wrote to each other when they were dating in the late sixties," she says. "They were so sweet."
Ms. Cohen, who runs an online antiques store, started a file of the handwritten messages she got from her boyfriend. As of last week, it had just two items in it: a birthday card on which he'd signed only his name, and the flight itinerary for a trip they took together to San Francisco, on which he had written "Get ready for San Francisco!" For Ms. Cohen, there was potential sentimental value in that itinerary because it showed enthusiasm. "It had an exclamation point," she says.
The couple broke up last month.
� Email Jeffrey.Zaslow@wsj.com about your love letters. Selected comments will be available at WSJ.com/OnlineToday on Valentine's Day.
p.s. how do you guys feel about some of the news articles i post? i know it's kinda lame that nearly all of them are from wsj, but it's the only paper i read semi-regularly because i have a student subscription.
i really liked this article, because i'm all about the love letters. <3 romantics
http://www.thinktankforums.com/thread.php?thread_id=573
i really liked this article, because i'm all about the love letters. <3 romantics
http://www.thinktankforums.com/thread.php?thread_id=573
I enjoy them, I'm just not sure how they feel about reposting articles!
That's ... depressing. There's something about e-mail and SMS that just doesn't work with love letters. It's so impersonal.
Your fingers touch the keyboard which encodes your thoughts to ANSI standards only to relay them over other standards only to be decoded by someone...
Your fingers touch the keyboard which encodes your thoughts to ANSI standards only to relay them over other standards only to be decoded by someone...
yeah, for me a huge part is the stationary and the penmanship. come on!