Why did we stop writing love letters?

There was a time when love lived on paper.

Ink-stained confessions, folded into envelopes, carried across distances, sealed with the weight of emotions too heavy to be spoken aloud. Letters held longing, vulnerability, and time itself because love back then required patience. But somewhere between instant messaging and disappearing texts, we stopped writing love letters and maybe, just maybe, we lost something along the way.

A love letter was never just words. It was a piece of someone, something they touched, something they breathed life into, something they took the time to craft just for you. It had weight and it had presence. A love letter was a declaration that could be held in trembling hands, re-read under moonlight, or tucked inside a drawer, aging like fine wine.

Love letters had permanence. Now? Love is written in pixels, sent in shorthand, erased in a tap, we traded slow, deliberate affection for speed. We tell each other “I miss you” with a two-second text instead of pages of poetry or we say “I love you” with emojis instead of carefully chosen words that hold our souls. We are connected—but we are no longer intentional.

And what does that say about us? About the way we love now?

Once upon a time, though not that long ago, love moved slowly. It asked us to wait. To wonder. To write. To feel in the quiet between replies. Love had a certain rhythm back then, like a song that built slowly toward the chorus. There was beauty in the suspense, in checking the mailbox or listening for the landline to ring. We waited because love was worth the time. Now, we refresh WhatsApp and spiral if the typing bubble disappears. One missed message and we’re already rewriting the ending in our heads. Is that evolution or erosion?

Back then, love left evidence. Not receipts. Not screen grabs.
Proof.

Letters that outlived relationships. Notes stuffed between pages of old books. Scribbled confessions that, years later, still smelled faintly of the perfume you wore when you wrote them. They aged with you. They meant something. But today? Texts vanish with a broken phone. Our declarations are stored in clouds we don’t control. We say “I miss you” with disappearing messages. No texture. No weight. No trace.

And perhaps the greatest loss of all?
Love used to travel. Not just across cities or oceans but across time. A letter could sit unopened in a suitcase for weeks, and still arrive with all the weight it was written with. When you opened it, it didn’t just speak it touched you. The paper they folded. The ink they pressed into the page. The smudge where they paused to think. That letter could live under your pillow or in your wallet, surviving years and moves and heartbreak. A message you could hold, not just read. A moment that felt alive, even as everything else moved on.

We traded all of that for convenience.
But in doing so did we make love forgettable?

Maybe the question isn’t just how we love now.
Maybe it’s whether we still know how to.Can we bring love letters back? The world has changed. We don’t live in an era of quills and parchment. But maybe, just maybe, we can bring back what love letters stood for by creating something lasting, something that doesn’t depend on a WiFi signal.Writing something worth keeping. A note, a letter, something that won’t disappear in a chat history purge.

Love deserves more than a timestamp. It deserves permanence. Because love, when written down, has a way of never fading.