Photo by Bonnie Holland
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The Smitten Word
By Marilyn Mapp, November 2005, May 2007
Never underestimate the power of love letters
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About 15 years ago, while helping her mother prepare her Florida home for renovation, Lana Turner of New York City stumbled upon a box of World War II-era love letters that her father had written to his new bride.
"I think the biggest [surprise] was that they actually wrote," Turner says. "When you come from a family that's not particularly literary... I never saw them read books and I don't remember them writing anything, other than something perfunctory."
Finding these loving missives changed the way Turner viewed her parents. When she re-reads the letters, it gives her a warm feeling of closeness to them, though her father died in 1972. Her mother suffers from Alzheimer's disease.
"When I came across these [letters], I was shocked. Love letters. Something he actually wrote. Something he had to compose. I was so in love with the fact they existed."
In an early letter, Army private Lee Turner wrote to his wife, Ida: I believe if I have to go [on] like this much longer, I'll be crazy. My mind is on nothing but you...
...Darling, I am so lonesome for you I don't know what to do. It hasn't been two months since I saw you but it seems like it has been two years.
While the letters are filled with touching, loving emotions, Lee Turner also filled pages with concern for his wife's economic welfare: Did the money arrive? Did she pay the rent? Did she get a job?
"He signed the letters 'your true and loving husband.' I thought, what a way to end a letter," Turner says.
Times of war—and other life events, such as a job relocation, that separate couples for long periods of time—often spark the most touching letters. "To be at a distance sometimes crystallizes the things you value," says Sallie Foley, AARP The Magazine's "Modern Love" columnist.
Take Isabel Shipley Cunningham and Chipman Woodward Cunningham, who saw each other only about eight times during the year before their June 1943 wedding at Fort Benning, Georgia.
They still managed to connect with each other often, via the romantic letters that "Chip" regularly penned, two each week on average for the 21 months he was away from home.
From his Christmas Day 1944 letter: You have taught me the greatest happiness a man can experience—true, rich, exquisite love. All my world revolves around you. You are all I want.
"It was wartime," recalls Isabel, who lives in Annapolis, Maryland. "If we had had a normal courtship, I doubt if anything like that would ever have been written.... In wartime, you feel like it's not that much time left. You don't play hard to get. You don't play games. They may not always be there. You tell your real feelings."
Even in today's world of e-mails and mobile phones, love letters still rule. Angela Kennington, the wife of Lee, an Army staff sergeant who recently served a year-long tour of duty in Afghanistan, could have grown frustrated, caring alone for their three daughters (ages 7, 5, and 1) while he was away. But she says his love for her, as expressed through his letters, helped keep her upbeat.
The letters are almost better than having him there in person because "he says things to me in letters that he would never say in person, things from the heart," Kennington says.
"We were able to open up more in letters than we were in real life. When we were reunited, that closeness remained," she says.
I'm very glad to be married to you, he writes in one letter. In another, he says, I will take this part of the letter to say I love you. And I love you some more. I think you know it, but you like to hear it, don't you?
It's lines like that that help lift Kennington from the doldrums while Lee is away for long periods. (He returned to their Hawaii home in April after his tour in Afghanistan.)
"I kept the most recent one next to my bed and read it every night before I went to sleep, until I got the next one. It's so comforting, like having him there," she says.
Pour Your Heart Out
Love letters have a place in all relationships, especially those that have lasted for years: to help relight romantic fires and to improve communication. Exchanging love letters helps grow bonds that will see couples through the rough patches of any relationship, especially the inevitable loss and illness of later years.
"The more people take time to write, the better they get at expressing themselves. Writing words on a page is actually in some ways talking to yourself...you're saying to yourself what you want the other person to know," Foley says. "The more they express themselves, the better they will be understood. The better understood, the more connected they feel."
Foley, a therapist in private practice and author of Sex and Love for Grownups:
A No-Nonsense Guide to a Life of Passion, sometimes gives her patients love letter writing as a homework assignment.
“People get so busy that they forget to say [loving thoughts] or they
take it for granted that the other person knows. Or sometimes they overfocus on
the irritating, boring, or annoying parts” of relationships, Foley
says.
She’ll often suggest that long-married patients “write a letter
to yourself and then to your partner about what you like about this
partnership.”
On “signal” occasions, such as a child’s college
graduation or the birth of a grandchild, she suggests that couples write to
each other about what the event means as a milepost in their love journey.
“They don’t often stop and say, ‘Let’s write to each
other about this,’ ” Foley says. “Those letters will have a
lot of meaning over the years.”
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