When I was in high school in Denmark, I exchanged letters every few weeks with a girl that I had a mild crush on, who lived in the U.S. When a new letter arrived, it was usually the high point of my day. And when a few more days or weeks passed and it was my turn to write, I’d have to think about all the letter-worthy events that had happened since the last letter that I wrote, and ask for follow-up details about the episodes she had told me about. (First kiss! Are they still dating? Is her last boyfriend jealous?)
It seems like kids these days are growing up without having any idea what this feels like.
It would be extremely odd to send a several-page letter to someone in a single Facebook message. There’s nothing stopping you, but I’ve never heard of anyone doing it. The medium is made for bite-sized interaction – even if you’re not chatting in real time, you share a thought and then usually wait less than a day for a response. And I certainly wouldn’t want to give this up; it’s the easiest way to stay in touch with friends and casual acquaintances who have moved away, or to reach someone with a question that doesn’t need an immediate answer. But you never have the feeling of waiting for weeks for a letter that finally arrives.
Some organizations have sprung up around reviving the “lost art of letter-writing,” but it feels much more contrived to write letters to someone across the country when you know that both of you are on Facebook and you could reach each other instantly. At that point, you’re just throwing a roadblock in your own path just to be “special.” Well, it’s a free country. But what happens if you have a quick question for that same friend, so you shoot them a Facebook message, and they reply? Is the spell broken? Now you ask them what’s been going on in their life, and they reply with the details, but spoiling all the surprises that were supposed to arrive with their next snail mail letter?
When e-mail became ubiquitous in the late ‘90s, I had a few friends that I stayed in touch with email, and there was a tacit agreement that we’d wait about a week before writing to each other, just so that we wouldn’t always feel on both sides that we had an e-mail writing “homework assignment” hanging over our heads, and to give us time for enough stuff to happen that we’d have something to write about. E-mails may have been delivered in less than a minute, but they weren’t a medium for chatting. Facebook messages felt a little bit like that at the very beginning, when you could find a message in your inbox and reply with news of the past week’s events. But now that every Facebook message opens in a chat box, it feels weird to type more than a few sentences in a single message.
In the days of letter-writing, the most flattering and important message contained in a single letter was: You are worth this effort. You can tell someone all you want, “I miss you,” and “I can’t wait to see you again,” but if you write your friend a five-page letter, they can tell you mean it. Even if my crush didn’t feel the same way about me, our friendship was deepened by the fact that we cared enough to make the effort to stay in touch. And I still have the handwritten letters, 20 years later, in a storage container of keepsakes. What are kids today going to do, print out their favorite chat logs and keep them in a box?
