Are Love Notes a Young Couples Game?

When my husband and I first were together, young and with two small babes and a mountain of possibility before us, I would receive love letters all of the time. Sometimes they’d come in the form of a sticky note left on the bathroom mirror for me to find upon waking up.

“Just wanted to let you know I’m thinking of you, beautiful.”

Other times I’d find long three-page, tiny-printed scrolls telling me how much he appreciated our growing family.

And as time wore on and technology sprouted oftentimes, these love letters would transform into public displays of affection placed unapologetically on my Facebook page for all the world to see. Well, at least for all my friends and family to see — I keep my security tight, folks.

I loved these letters. They were just one of our marriage’s little offerings that showed me how much my husband cared about our relationship.

Now ten years later, and with a lot of life experience under my belt, the love letters seem to be a thing of the past.

Actually, that’s not exactly true. A few months ago, while I was glued to my computer and on a deadline for a piece I had been working on, I found a hand-drawn cartoon penis that was thumbs-upping slipped under my office door with a caption that read, “go balls deep in writing, babe!”

I’d add a photo, but it’s pretty explicitly drawn, and I don’t want to offend anyone, even though it was pretty hilarious.

The point is I don’t receive love notes anymore. And to be fair, I rarely send him any either.

I used to write him poetry and social media declarations of love. Not now. We’re both too tired, I guess.

It got me thinking, though, is there something wrong with us and our relationship? These love letters we once gave one another were something of a cornerstone in our relationship. We thought we were somehow superior to other couples because we could easily put down on paper our love for the other.

I try to think back to when the notes stopped, and I can’t pinpoint it. A few years back, when we owned our bakery, Jamie would leave me notes taped to the industrial ovens and sink, reminding me to prep this or that and then at the end write something like, “P.S. My boss has the cutest butt.”

We both knew he was the boss, being the red seal chef, but he let me pretend that I was in charge, which always made my head swell and my heart full with love for my significant other.

Life hasn’t been kind to our relationship this past year, as I’m sure many couples can relate to in this strange post-2020 world.

With quarantine and job loss, kids at home, and so much health stress, it has been difficult to prioritize strengthening our marriage. I think it must have been this past year when the notes stopped for good, now that I think about it.

When I really begin to dissect the love note issue, I realize something fundamental, however.

We stopped because we don’t need them anymore.

Yes, 2020 has been extraordinarily difficult on our marriage. So much so that all of the other relationship articles I’ve written in the past feel somehow like a sham because, in truth, we had briefly spoken about separation over those long months of October and November.

But then, as if we both had the fog shaken out of our weary brains, we learned how to talk to one another again. Until that moment, it was all blame, resentment and fear surfacing every time something set us off onto another screaming tangent.

It took many weeks of carefully talking about our feelings to get back onto a healthy relationship track. We are still working on it to this day. Now, however, we ask how the other is feeling. We don’t allow ourselves to get defensive when opening up to one another. We keep conversations about everything open and honest, and then we deal with it one day at a time.

A month and a half ago, I was having one of these honest conversations with my husband about the possibility of separation, and I remember saying, “It’s just, I don’t feel like you love me anymore because you don’t show it. You never even write me letters anymore. I don’t think you know how much I used to love that.”

After many more painfully honest talks and a lot of brain-training on sensitivity and acceptance, I finally realize that we don’t need the love letters.

For many years, this was our way of communicating our appreciation to each other. We are both writers at heart, and it’s easy to fall onto the page rather than put your feelings into the world with vocal cords.

Writing allows us to edit our thoughts — perfect them to be the epitome of what our significant others might want to hear. Whereas in real-time, our words and emotions often get jumbled into something else or twisted to meet some ulterior motive.

But after ten years, I think it’s about time that we accept the task of talking to one another. It feels good to word-vomit sometimes onto the person you love most in the world. And in turn, allow them to word-vomit onto you — okay, that analogy is getting weird, I see that.

Either way, our love note writing has come to an end. I’m not saying that we will never write love letters to one another in the future, but now we will also have the added benefit of real-time conversations.

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This post was previously published on Hello, Love.

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