How to write a love letter

Zachary Balcoff

In the 1930s, Michelle Janning’s grandmother was living in a South Dakota boardinghouse and working as a teacher. Married women were still barred from teaching in the state, so she had claimed to be single and lived in a separate town from her husband. Despite this, she would visit Hay’s Cafe and write him love letters on the restaurant’s stationery.

Nearly a century later, her granddaughter, now a sociologist at Whitman College and author of “Love Letters: Saving Romance in the Digital Age,” has saved several of those letters. While they often contained everyday news, such as how farm crops were doing, some aspects hinted at more emotional moments in their relationship.

A love letter has always held power - for the recipient, of course, but also for the writer and any descendants who stumble upon those inky descriptions of devotion. Love letters can “preserve the story of [a] relationship for generations to come, even if it’s really private information,” Janning says. “There’s some piece of us that doesn’t want to be done. We wanna live on.”

If you’re lucky enough to have a love in your life, write your feelings down. We consulted experts, poets and a professional greeting-card writer to tell you how.

Do I have to write it by hand?

Yes. While Janning believes texts and videos can also be quite meaningful, a written letter does carry a particular weight. “It means that, ‘I took time. I slowed down. I removed myself from this hectic world for you,’” Janning says. “That can be a really meaningful gesture in a fast-paced, digital world.”

Poet and author Chen Chen often exchanges handwritten letters or notes with his partner. “When I receive a handwritten letter, I just love knowing that it was the person and this particular person who wrote it,” he says. “However beautiful, messy or beautifully messy it is, it just feels that much more personal knowing that this came directly from their hand.”

And you might actually write something better if you are doing it longhand. Poet Tara Betts, who often begins her work by hand, says that there’s “a stronger connection between hand and mind when you’re writing on paper. … I sit down to write, the pen starts moving, and it may be a little bit slower than if I actually type, but I’m thinking about what I want to put on the page more deliberately.”

Should I use ChatGPT?

No. “There are services out there that you can pay for to have somebody write your love letter for you,” Janning says. “Just imagine how easy it would be to ask ChatGPT or some AI bot to write your letter.” But it wouldn’t be written by you, and it wouldn’t be believable.

Plus, readers are getting better at spotting AI-generated text. “I have a funny image in my mind of lovers putting their partner’s love letter through an AI detector,” Janning says.

Well, what do I write about?

Pay close attention to the things that move you about the person you’re with, Betts says, and to what you really remember about them. “Like the things that you two share that maybe some other people don’t know about,” she says. “The intimate details that the world doesn’t always get to see are the things that sometimes move us closer to someone.”

Specificity is key. If you’re writing a poem, Betts says, you focus on “how would you use your senses to describe how they make you feel as opposed to ‘You make you feel happy.’” In one of her own poems, “Untitled for a Reason,” she compared love to the taste of blueberries.

“Love is kind of brutal or it puts you through changes, but also it can be very sweet, which is why the opening of the poem - I thought about blueberries - and how we eat them. We crush them to discover their sweetness,” Betts says. “It’s about ‘this is the concrete action that evokes the feeling.’”

What is it supposed to sound like?

People might be tempted to borrow from the past to write their love letters - “things that sound like they’re from a 19th-century poetry book” or “a 1950s movie,” Janning says. “The use of flowery, poetic, literary-referenced writing might be more present in a handwritten letter because that’s the sort of image that we have of those letters and it connects closely with the goal of a nostalgic representation of romance.”

But there’s no reason your handwritten love letter shouldn’t sound like how you talk. Sydney Jones, an editor at Hallmark Cards, says Hallmark’s writers often pursue what she calls the ‘as I would say it’ tone.

“Just the way that maybe people text or write little notes,” Jones says. One of her favorite cards at Hallmark is the increasingly popular “I freaking love you.”

“It just says, ‘I freaking love you,’” Jones says. “It’s so short and effective and so real and it’s really refreshing.”

Jones advises letter-writers to not look at other handwritten letters or to the internet for advice. “Do whatever feels natural for you,” she says. Casual is fine, and maybe even preferable. Jones likes “relevant, real-life details,” like “I love seeing your name pop up on my phone or on my screen.”

How do I avoid being corny?

Well, you probably don’t. “I say embrace the cheese,” Chen says. “I think it’s time. When else? If you’re writing a love letter to someone, when else are you going to embrace the cheese, the sentiment, the emotion? I think you’re kind of denying yourself the opportunity. It’s so human, it’s so vulnerable. Why deny yourself the chance to say something really corny?”