Love through letters: a look into the most iconic symbol of love
Whether in its traditional form or its contemporary iterations—love letters are a highly romantic and sensual expression of love.
Karen Chalamilla
In the first offering in Jenny Han’s trilogy, To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before (2014), Lara Jean pens 5 letters to her crushes with the intention of sending none—she simply wants to get the overwhelming feelings that come with having a crush on someone off her chest. However, when her younger sister Kitty mails off the letters to each crush, Lara Jean finds herself having to deal with the rapidly unfolding issues that ensue after each crush reads her innermost longing about them. Her motivation to write love letters (even without any intention of sending them) is understandable whether you’ve written one or not: I have these big feelings for someone and they are so big that I feel I might burst if I don’t spill them somewhere outside of me.
Whether fictional or not, pop culture has generously afforded us a glimpse into the private desires and psyche of those who pen love letters. Literature, in particular, has a long-standing history of achingly romantic prose exchanged in the form of letters. From writers to Kings, from men to women and women to other women, it seems as if no one was immune. In the well-known Persuasion (1817) by Jane Austen, an otherwise stoic Wentworth professes his love for Anne in a letter: “Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant…For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this?” And then there’s the real-life erotic, carnal pining of novelist James Joyce for his wife, whom he fondly refers to as “my sweet little whorish Nora,” where he bountifully details their sexual escapades.
The charm of the love letter is further realised in it being effortful. If we think of love as a verb, then the level of effort we put into romantic gestures matters. First, there is the work required to physically craft it; handwriting is a slower, much more elaborate process. It requires patience; the stroke-by-stroke motion of writing is deliberate enough that you are forced to really engage with how you feel. It becomes a lot harder to hide your emotions not only from your love interest but also from yourself. In the aforementioned Persuasion, Austen writes that Wentworth was so overcome with emotion by the time he was done writing his letter that the address “Miss A.E.” at the front was “hardly legible.”
There is also the work that the love letter does of covering the distance that necessitates its existence in the first place. Whether it is an emotional or physical distance, sending a letter to a loved one is an earnest attempt at maintaining closeness. Making your private desires public for your love interest is a bid to bridge the gap between the two of you. Putting these desires in letter form makes them tangible. They are not just fleeting feelings when there is physical proof you can touch and hold. There is the added intimacy of this proof being embellished by their personal handwriting. In the bestselling novel by Cecelia Ahern, P.S. I Love You (2004), the distance between the two lovers is death. Before her husband Gerry dies, he writes his wife Holly letters and arranges for them to be mailed at different times in her life. In this case, the desires are not necessarily private, as he quite literally can no longer communicate them. But the effect is the same—she has him close to her as she navigates the grief of losing him.
The frequency of love letters in literature is understandable when you consider how writing mirrors this romantic gesture. There is just as much thoughtfulness that goes into putting together sentences word by word until they form a narrative that clearly communicates certain ideas to readers. And on the other end, readers can find intimacy in reading. It’s a fairly private endeavour—deciphering the idea bit by bit and getting more and more acquainted with the writer’s sensibilities through their work.
In music, R&B in particular, we find yet another iteration of the love letter. A large chunk of the R&B genre is made up of songs composed of lyrics with the most tender, most passionate outpourings accentuated by gorgeous voices and great production. From the naked vulnerability of Alicia Keys in Fallin’ (“How do you give me so much pleasure/ And cause me so much pain”), to Marvin Gaye’s spicy crooning in Sexual Healing (“I’m hot just like an oven/ I need some lovin’…When I get that feeling/ I need sexual healing”). Since its inception, R&B artists have had us living vicariously through them as we listen to their public love letters dressed as songs directed to who we imagine is the singer’s lover.
In some instances, you need not imagine. The penultimate track on singer/songwriter Ariana Grande’s pop/RnB album Sweetener (2018) (which coincidentally dropped on the same day as the film adaptation of To All The Boys) is named “pete davidson.” It is a love letter of its own kind, this one addressed directly by way of the song title to her then-boyfriend. The lyrics, “Universe must have my back/ fell from the sky into my lap/ and I know you know that you’re my soulmate and all that,” could very well be the contents of a love letter. The message is clear: I have these big feelings for someone and they are so big that I want the world to know.
With public love letters that have a clear recipient, listeners trade in their vicarious position for one of the observers. In 2014, Robin Thicke released an album titled Paula, after his ex-wife Paula Patton. A supposed apology and plea to win his estranged wife back, the album follows their divorce and Patton’s relative silence about the end of their relationship. The piece de resistance of the album is the single Get Her Back in which he sings, “I should’ve never raised my voice, or made you feel so small…I should have kissed you longer/ I should have held you stronger, And I’ll wait forever for you to love me again.” The single (and album) garnered well-deserved criticism for being over-indulgent and ostentatious. Most music listeners agreed that it was far too public of a plea to be sincere.
Robin Thicke laying their relationship bare for public scrutiny is one part of the issue. The other is that when a public assertion of your love for someone is the only remaining way to access them, what the writer perceives as a love letter ends up being a breach of boundary for the recipient. It is no longer romantic, and given the circumstances that led to their divorce, it became “an act of aggression.”
Public love letters are tricky. Public love letters where the recipient is disclosed? Even more so. Although one cannot choose whether someone will send them a love letter or not, when it's private, you have the freedom of how to respond (if at all) and what to do with the letter itself. In the past, this freedom was perhaps circumstantial, but now that technology has flattened so many of the barriers to access, giving your love interest that freedom means that much more.
Most R&B music, however, is not only a public love letter but also an open one. Most songs are not addressed to anyone in particular but to a whole audience. As a result, we all get to feel serenaded and indulge in our mutual appreciation for the serenading. This makes for the kind of music where listeners fanatically scream lyrics back in concerts or dedicate songs to crushes on the radio. It makes for the kind of music that had me wishing I could be the girl in a music video peering out of a window, my Usher-esque love interest professing their love for me through song while their friend supportively holds up a boombox blaring the backing track.
Sometimes R&B even lets us indulge in the kind of limerence we would feel too exposed to admitting to, the kind that might even be considered irrational. In Beyoncé's verse in Destiny's Child's hit Cater 2 U, she sings, "Baby I see you working hard/ I want to let you know I'm proud… Don't know if I need to reassure you, my life would be purposeless without you." In singer/songwriter Case's song Missing You, he misses his lover so much it makes him hallucinate her likeness, and more recently, in SZA's song Snooze, she offers to take the fall for her lover's crimes if need be. There's an illogical side to romantic feelings that R&B appeals to perfectly, and the lyrics not being dedicated to anyone, in particular, makes the irrationality more palatable for us. It adds a sense of fantasy to our listening experience, so we feel seen and feed our darker desires without judgement. The effect that privacy had in the love letters we saw in literature; we find here in the very public nature of music.
Whether in its traditional form or its contemporary iterations—love letters are a highly romantic and sensual expression of love. A gesture capable of being both grand and delicate. At its sincerest, it manages to belong to the love interest it addresses without diminishing the beholder's claim to it. We largely owe time (both in its passing and the constant feeling that we don't have enough) for its morphing into various forms in all pop cultural corners. But as long as humans have love to share, the love letter will forever live on with its essence intact, for there are few things more romantic than affectionate prose.
Karen Chalamilla is a gender and media researcher and culture writer based in the digital world. Most of her work centres on pop culture, and African and Black womanhood. Karen's work has been featured in The Floor Mag, Tangaza Magazine, Gal-dem, and various research hubs. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram.
