I think a lot about writing to and about love—the old, the current, and future love. Writing is my bread and butter, a craft I have always enjoyed but surely dread. Academic theses, journalism assignments, creative proposals—none of these enabled me to pour out words the way I do when writing about love. I keep wondering why writing love letters gives a kind of satisfaction that texting, phone calls, or even face-to-face conversations never quite do.
As a “writer,” I have found an outlet in love letters—an audience for my words, satisfying this constant urge I have to broadcast my thoughts to the world.
Since my teenage years, I’ve kept rereading Ghassan Kanafani’s Love Letters to Ghada Al-Samman (1992), a timeless collection of letters exchanged between the two writers, who were in a complicated affair during the 1970s. Twenty-five years after the assassination of the Palestinian author and activist Ghassan Kanafani, his lover, the poet and Syrian literary icon Ghada Al-Samman, decided to publish their private letters. She was criticized for “spilling all the tea,” for violating the unspoken confidentiality code of love letters. You’re not supposed to show your lover’s words to the world. Still, I’m glad the book exists. I just hope none of my own letters ever get exposed—unless they end up in a bestselling book.
Despite the controversy around it, I found the book to be essential. The younger version of me thought it was romantic. I wanted to receive letters from a lover with ink stains from their tears as they expressed their never-ending love. Now, I think—among all the therapeutic techniques we use to reflect and heal—love letters might be one of the best. They let you express pain and passion, to go all in with your emotions. Sending them out offers a kind of relief, an acceptance that these feelings exist, and that the only way to redeem yourself is to confess and release them.
Writing love letters is still very much alive. A friend of mine who had been in a decade-long romance once showed me a pile of papers—some with dried flowers glued on, others with doodles and drawings. All the love letters they had written over the years: during special occasions, moments of reconciliation, the honeymoon phase, while traveling long-distance. This friend would flip through the pages, telling me the story behind each letter. I imagined them framed on a gallery wall, telling passionately and effortlessly a very human story of true love.
I once had a lethal argument with an ex-lover, and we ended up blocking each other on every possible communication channel. The only way left to talk was email. And with email, even if you block someone, their messages still land in your spam folder—and if you’re a spam checker, you’ll read them, with or against your will. Because of how the relationship ended, many grievances were still open. I found myself writing long, emotionally explosive messages, lines and lines of how I was feeling, how it affected me, how my life was going, and just random worldly reflections that felt right to say at the time.
Even though that relationship is long over, we continued to exchange emails for years. Sometimes, I forgot what this person looked like. Sometimes I questioned if they even existed anymore. But the love was still there—in the words.
The nature of digital letter exchange, especially through email, allows both people to keep the full conversation. I can’t help but feel that, when you continue to exchange letters with someone, it’s like journaling together—about yourselves, and each other. There’s a level of intimacy and vulnerability in showing your words, having them seen, read, and kept by someone else.
Sure, people express themselves in different ways. Some speak better than they write. Some make mixtapes. Some communicate through touch. Some look you right in the eyes. But I still argue that written letters are the ultimate form of love communication. To surrender to your thoughts and emotions, and articulate them in words, is an exercise that could change the way you view relationships forever.
Written love is peak human literature. Peak music. Peak philosophy. All of it was, still is, a product of love letters.
Recently, I came across a dating-help Instagram account that offers advice on navigating modern romance. One post explained how to write a message to tell someone you’re no longer interested in seeing them. It suggested a text template you could personalize—but it felt AI-generated. It freaked me out. Even small texts, ones that should take no time and minimal effort, are being optimized? What will that do to the art of writing love letters?
Will lovers start delegating their love essays to Chat GPT and its likes? Will AIs be sending love letters to each other through humans, making us passive participants in the very thing that defines us as superior beings—the ability to rationalize, to love, and to form words?
In a time when modern life creates distance between us and our loved ones—even in the same city—we yearn to connect more. Technology helps us see each other more: video calls, emojis, filters, online games. But with so much content coming from our loved ones, I worry the little details are diluting deeper connection. We have fewer conversations about bigger thoughts, having less conclusions and more conversations about who we are and what happens in the world at times when nothing feels grounding.
I don’t encourage anyone to write love letters to their toxic exes. But if you feel an irresistible urge to write, it might be less about who reads it and more about the act of releasing it to an audience. If you want that audience while keeping your ego intact, there’s a Reddit community of 19,000 hopeless romantics writing anonymous love letters at r/LoveLetters. They might be the perfect people to receive what you have to say.
This piece was initially commissioned as part of a collaboration between MILLE WORLD and Kalam Aflam.
