Have you ever tried to write a love letter in 2025?
Emails and WhatsApp messages with heart emojis won’t do. A real letter — the kind you write by hand, with ink, paper, and maybe even a sigh hidden between the lines.
Well, yes. If you’ve never done this, you may not know what it’s like to love slowly.
In this series, we will visit the small, great things that time, in its haste, has left behind. We will start with one of the most beautiful: the art of writing love letters.
It is said, with a certain technical pride, that we live in the age of speed. Words, once at rest, now travel at a gallop along the invisible cables of the world, running over commas, bumping into feelings and reaching hearts — if there are any left — without even knocking on the door.
In the past, a letter was written as if it were a piece of hope: choosing the paper (linen, if possible), the ink, the time of day, and even the mood of the pen. There was a ceremonial gesture in the act of writing—almost a domestic cult of the soul. The paper was folded delicately, sealed with longing, and the envelope departed like a paper ship carrying the sender’s entire heart inside.
The letters smelled—of cologne, of old paper, of flowers pressed between the pages—and sometimes a little pollen from last spring. We waited for the answer with the fervor of someone waiting for the train of happiness. And when it arrived, our fingers trembled! We opened them slowly, as if destiny lived inside.
But then came the e-mails. And with them, the beginning of ruin. Paper was no longer folded, stamps were wet, and the scent of longing was no longer felt. The “send” button replaced the postman, and waiting became the anguish of a server down.
And finally, the fatal blow: apps. Yes, those instant messengers that transformed love into “hi, I’ve been missing you”, longing into emojis, and romance into notifications.
Who, nowadays, would write: “My beloved, your words came to me like the autumn breeze, and rested on me like the shade of the linden trees in the square where I saw you for the last time”? No one. Instead, they send three little hearts and a figurine of a bear holding a bouquet.
I, who wrote letters until I got married — and I still remember the care in folding the margins, the anxiety in the face of the reply, and the emotion of recognizing the beloved handwriting on the envelope —, look at today’s loves and sigh. Not because they are lesser, but because they lack the ritual.
And love, my dears, needs rituals, pauses, delays. It needs waiting. It needs paper.
Perhaps, in an unlikely future, when digital files are lost and messages evaporate on the servers of oblivion, a young man will find a yellowed letter from his grandparents in a trunk — and finally understand what it means to love with letters and with expectations.
