Love Letters

Saving Romance in the Digital Age

Michelle Janning

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138055261
  9781138055254
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351678780
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In today's world of Tinder and texting, do we write and save love letters anymore? Are we more likely to save a screenshot of a text exchange or a box of paper letters from a lover? How might these different ways to store a love letter make us feel? Sociologist Michelle Janning's Love Letters: Saving Romance in the Digital Age offers a new twist on the study of love letters: what people do with them and whether digital or paper format matters. Through stories, a rich review of past research, and her own survey findings, Janning uncovers whether and how people from different groups (including gender and age) approach their love letter "curatorial practices" in an era when digitization of communication is nearly ubiquitous. She investigates the importance of space and time, showing how our connection to the material world and our attraction to nostalgia matter in actions as seemingly small and private as saving, storing, stumbling upon, or even burning a love letter. Janning provides a framework for understanding why someone may prefer digital or paper love letters, and what that preference says about a person's access and attachment to powerful cultural values such as individualization, taking time in a hectic world, longevity, privacy, and keeping cherished things in a safe place. Ultimately, Janning contends, the cultural values that tell us how romantic love should be defined are more powerful than the format our love letters take.

1
The Stuff of Love

The Historical and Cultural Significance of (Saving) Love Letters

It would be difficult to find someone in today’s world who has never heard or seen a reference to love letters on a big or small screen, in print, or on the radio. I am part of a social network filled with people who know about love letters as they have been represented across time and in various media forms, from plays to contemporary podcasts, from 18th-century epistolary novels to romantic comedies and love songs. It was no surprise, then, that when I solicited ideas for fictional or non-fictional references to love letters in my social media feed, I got more responses than I would ever have time to read, view, listen to, or skim. Suggestions such as The Notebook, You’ve Got Mail, and The Lakehouse were offered to show love letters’ (both paper and digital) prominence on the big screen (and sometimes in print first).

Books and plays, such as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance, or Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, were listed in order to show how romance—and the letters that connote it—have featured centrally in authors’ writings for hundreds of years (and, actually, for some of these, on the big screen, too). Scholar friends reminded me that key social thinkers often referenced in academic courses have said some of their most important things in letters, evidenced by writings from Simone de Beauvoir, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Max Weber, among others. Even books that have emerged from love letter references in other platforms are being published, as evidenced by the two-volume series Love Letters of Great Men; this is a published collection of real letters from prominent historic male figures such as Beethoven and Lord Byron that was spawned from a reference in the fictional movie Sex and the City. It wasn’t a real book until the movie mentioned it.

My musician friends suggested songs such as “Love Letters,” the Academy Award–nominated song featured in the 1945 movie of the same name. This song has been so popular that its lyrics—“I’m not alone in the night when I can have all the love you write”—have been crooned over the years by artists such as Elvis Presley, Nat King Cole, and Diana Krall. Another friend called my attention to podcasts in order to show that love letters (and the saving of them) are being discussed within the milieu of current hot topics.

One such podcast—Helen Zaltzman’s The Allusionist—aired a two-part series on letters in October 2017. In this duet of podcasts, Zaltzman shares stories of writing and saving letters from lovers, family members, and even strangers. She begins the first episode with her own story:

I had a relationship before the 21st century. Neither of us had the internet yet, or mobile phones, or even landlines sometimes. So we wrote letters to each other, a lot, for more than three years. And I still have them, in a box, in another box. The odd thing is, I only have half the story, his half; he’s got mine. Or maybe he doesn’t, maybe he did get rid of them, a long time ago; I really hope he did destroy them. I haven’t looked at his letters since we broke up half my lifetime ago; but I can’t bring myself to throw them away either … I, however, very rarely write letters now. I barely even send birthday or Christmas cards. But I can’t shake the idea that letters are important.

As the podcast continues, Zaltzman interviews others whose stories shed light on how love letters, and physical hold-in-your-hand letters generally, matter, even if they’re not letters between lovers. For example, she shares a story about a letter-writing program designed to give letters from listeners to San Quentin Penitentiary inmates whose stories are featured on the podcast Ear Hustle. This program is meant to humanize the inmates and connect them to the world outside of the prison, a task that is especially challenging given their limited access to cell phones and internet. Nigel Poor, the program’s coordinator, reveals the significance of the program:

Getting a letter from the outside world is like a treasure, you know. It has the power that mail had originally… [when] it took months to get a letter, and when you got a letter you just savored it. It was a really important object, and that’s how it is inside prison. If you get a letter it’s like gold.

Zaltzman also shares the story of Dave Nedelberg, whose accidental stumbling across a love letter he never sent in high school (back in 1991) was the impetus for his stage show (and now multi-media platform) Mortified, where people read things they wrote as kids. He reflects on the impact that finding that box in his parents’ home in Michigan has had on his life today:

And inside that box, AAAAHH! It was really like opening up the Ark of the Covenant. Anyway there was like a whole bunch of things in there, and one of those things was a letter. And I read it and I thought, “This is ridiculous.” … It’s a pretty seismic change this little tiny letter had in my life. Whatever my 16-year-old brain thought going on a date with her would lead to, I got something a whole lot better. It never ceases to amaze me where this letter has taken me. Because of this letter I’ve met you. Because of this letter I’ve traveled the world. I’ve met like huge heads of various industries. I’ve met people who said that they’ve cried and had their lives changed because of something that happened in Mortified that they experienced. Babies have been born because of Mortified. And all these extraordinary things. That letter had no idea how powerful it was. Because it’s just a stupid little thing saying “this is who I am.”

These stories demonstrate a few key themes that are woven throughout this book. First, as Zaltzman’s own story and the San Quentin letter-writing program show, technology matters in any research about love letters, since the nearly ubiquitous availability of digital communication (except in some places, such as prisons) has affected the frequency and format of love letter writing, sharing, and storing; it has also changed the very meaning of a paper letter as something that may be even more treasured given its rarity. The role of technology in how love letters are defined is the focus of Chapter 2. What people do with their letters once received (whether they keep them, where they store them, and how often they look at them) may reveal what the letters mean to their recipients, which is the focus of Chapter 3. But these “curatorial” practices—as with Dave’s storage of his childhood letters and other mementos in his parents’ home—may also tell the larger story of cultural norms surrounding saving and storing material and digital objects, as well as the importance of spaces and places in an understanding of people’s relationships, life stages, identities, and the changing definition of romantic love. As Dave’s story shows, how people think about themselves today is wrapped up in these letters, especially when they reminisce about the past and wonder about the relevance of sentimentality and nostalgia in current identities. This—the cultural construction of time and memory and the impact of nostalgia—is featured in Chapter 4. Society is filled with group differences that can translate into inequalities that manifest in seemingly unimportant mundane practices such as love letter writing, practices that tell fascinating individual stories but that also tell the larger story about how culture works. This connection between the personal world of romantic communication and the collective world of shared cultural values (beliefs held about what is important or expected in a group), including the way that privilege shapes both individual and group experiences, is the focus of Chapter 5.

Through the examples listed above it is apparent that today’s cultural milieu is filled with reference to the significance of written communication between people who love each other. But has this changed over time? How might the changing definition of love, both across time and among different groups, matter in the definition of love letter today? How do sociologists and anthropologists approach their research on love as an emotion and as a part of culture? And, since countless scholars and writers have examined the content of love letters extensively in past work, what can focusing on love letters as objects of cultural significance, which includes what people do with them, add to current understandings?

Importantly, my aim here and in every chapter is not to assert whether saving love letters is right or wrong, how best to organize and “curate” them if they are saved, or whether digital or paper love letters are better or worse to save. My aim is to uncover what people do, why they do it, and what it may say about larger cultural forces that shape behaviors and beliefs.

But first, I define love letter.

What Is a Love Letter?

Pen-and-paper messages sent across geographic distance between lovers are the go-to image of love letters in popular media, advice columns about how to have a good relationship, and conversations I’ve had with people as I’ve ventured into my love letters research (see Figure 1.1). There’s even a card game entitled Love Letters that contains this kind of imagery. In this game, the players act as competing suitors to a princess who is locked in a palace. Each player woos the princess by getting their letters to her before the others. The imagery on the cards includes roses, calligraphy on parchment sealed with a red wax stamp, and cleavage-revealing clothing from an era where princesses are presumed to have hung out in towers. The cards come in a red velvet bag with the words “Love Letter” embroidered in gold cursive across the bag. The images in these game pieces call to mind ink pens and cursive on special paper, the color red, sexuality, and the function of a love letter to make romantic feelings known to the recipient. Nowhere in the instructions does it define love letter or explain its function or importance in the larger culture. Nowhere in the instructions is there an explanation for the imagery used in the game’s illustrations. It’s simply a game of luck and strategy that implements imagery of a subject that is assumed to be familiar among those who play the game.

Figure 1.1 Pen-and-Paper Letter (Source: Author Photograph)

Later in this chapter I delve into definitions of romantic love, including how the definition must be understood in terms of how culture works. Romance, intimacy, and partner connectedness have become central to the thematic content of contemporary love letters and their associated imagery in games and other popular culture elements, but these themes must be historically and geographically situated. And, as with any object of communication, what people are expected to do, what they have the ability to do, and what motivates them to do things are all impacted by forces beyond individual minds, bodies, and desires. For now, and even though it seems as if I’m defining something without first explaining the complex ways in which the concepts that are intimately comingled with it have changed and been challenged, I offer a working definition of love letter to be used throughout the rest of the book.

What exactly is the object in a book on love letters? How inclusive should a definition of love letter be, both so that it has enough focus to offer a sense of the concept’s boundaries, and enough flexibility to account for the list of seemingly endless platforms for communication in today’s rapidly changing digital society? Should it include envelopes, ink, or internal phone hardware used in digital texting apps? Certainly one may consider a smartphone itself to be a love letter-as-object if it contains romantic messages in one of its platforms, but a phone (or computer or box or sock drawer or cloud storage service) is a container that holds the love letter, not the letter itself. The hardware and applications in a phone, like ink and paper, are tools used to craft, send, store, and access the message, not the message itself. Additionally, certainly photographs, audio recordings, intricate drawings or doodles, and even recorded video messages or exchanges could be considered love letters, but my focus in this book is on exchanges that involve written communication.

I include only written messages as a way to represent what Stanley (2015) refers to as “ordinary writing, [which] has been a continuing feature in many cultures” (241). This means that I consider a love letter to be words written down and exchanged with someone else where the intent of the written message is, at least in part, to convey romantic love, intimacy, affection, or sexual interest. The love letter can be one word, or it can be a typed multi-page rhapsody. It can be handwritten or typed (or, I suppose, could even contain glued-on letters cut out of a magazine). It can contain other elements such as drawings or photos. I consider the message itself to be the love letter, in whatever format it comes. Included in the definition of love letter above is the notion that a letter can take different forms, have different lengths, include different norms about both style and content, include content unrelated to the conveyance of romantic love, and necessitate different time frames for receipt and response. While it is not the case that “anything goes” in this definition, it is true that it is expansive and allows for a lot of variety and interpretation. Thus, both digital and physical forms of messages that convey romance and affection count in my definition, which, in the survey findings that I present throughout this book, includes paper letters, notes, and cards, as well as text messages, emails, Facebook messages, and even captured Snapchats.

As you will read later in the book, this definition is not universally agreed upon, with the disagreement depending on someone’s belief that certain elements must be present in order to consider it to be a love letter. Further, since I conducted my survey in 2013, a myriad of other digital platforms that are used to exchange intimate messages between couples (or prospective sex or dating partners) have emerged and/or gained popularity, including Tinder, Couplete, LoveByte, Twyxt, and Kouply, to name a few. These are platforms couples use to communicate, and many have features whereby their messages can be saved and organized. Some platforms, such as Tinder (a social networking application used to signify to geographically close fellow users whether you find them intriguing enough to meet up in real life or not, indicated by swiping right or left on a smartphone), even have suggestions for how to communicate within the app in order to find a successful match with a person, suggesting that message conventions are alive and well in letter writing today. In the rest of the book, then, it is important to keep these and other new platforms in mind as I present findings. In many ways I suspect that the types of communication platforms I include in my research are similar to these newer platforms in terms of the themes I investigate, but it is important to consider how future research could examine differences within new digital platforms in terms of these themes.

My definition aligns with how love letters have been depicted in media forms and scholarly research for the last century, often invoking imagery of men at war sending love notes home to women, noted figures engaged in secret love affairs using only the written word to convey their feelings for each other, and the occasional Shakespeare sonnet embedded among other words of devotion that may be spritzed with a little perfume on purchased stationery. Popular love letter imagery has also included inked drawings of hearts and acronyms for phrases signifying physical attraction or contact such as SWAK (Sealed With A Kiss) or, as Teo (2005: 347) found in his study of Australian love letters, EGYPT (Eager to Grasp Your Pretty Toes), INDIA (Intercourse Needed Day I Arrive), or 0410E (Oh, For One Naughty). Now, of course, the convention of using pen and paper is less common, and the imagery doesn’t just evoke heterosexual relationships. And by virtue of digital communication technology, the usual expectation of awaiting an expected response for days or weeks rather than seconds or minutes has been abandoned. But the content devoted to attraction, intimacy, and affection remains in academic and popular renditions of (and popular sentiment about) love letters. I maintain that this content—that of romantic love—is included in a definition of love letter.

What Is Cultural About Romantic Love?

Romantic love has varied in its definition across time and geographic space. The ideal ways to both experience and express love are culturally variable. In the Western world, for example, the industrial period “romantic love ethic” idealized falling head over heels in love and losing control. In places such as India, as Arlie Hochschild describes in The Commercialization of Intimate Life (2003), romantic love is more likely to be “seen as a dangerous, chaotic emotion” (122) because it destabilizes systems that require marriages to be arranged by extended families, often with economic considerations at the forefront of the arrangement. The feeling of dread and guilt among soon-to-be spouses that researchers studying romantic love in places that practice arranged marriages have studied alters the feeling of romantic love itself. Thus, there are cultural differences in how romantic love operates in terms of how present it is in modern relationships, and in terms of how it actually feels.

As Hochschild continues, “[e]ach culture has its unique emotional dictionary, which defines what is and isn’t, and its emotional bible, which defines should and shouldn’t” (122). Necessarily, then, it is important to look at romantic love as an emotion that is experienced and expressed culturally. In the cultural context of people whose stories and experiences are discussed in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Stuff of Love: The Historical and Cultural Significance of (Saving) Love Letters
• 2 The Digitization of Love: Technology and Communication Within Romantic Relationships
• 3 Space Matters: Where and How Love Letters Are “Curated”
• 4 Time Matters: Nostalgia, Preserving Love Letters, and the Social Construction of Time and Memory
• 5 Love Letters as Both Individual and Collective: The Public Significance of Private Communications
• Methodological Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index