Love is something that happens, that develops in time and has different stages. First, there is a moment of meeting.

Sometimes it is a meeting between two people—there can be less and more, but sometimes there are two—and this meeting is an intensified moment of accepting and cherishing many, many facets of each other. Accepting, together with all the awe and beauty and wonders, all the most human and ridiculous, cringey qualities of that other person as well.

When this moment of radical meeting happens, there is a certain acceptance of the fact that you also can be loved. And that this other person—you feel that this other person is actually capable of it. And you believe them. To accept that you can be loved by someone else, you need to accept that you can be loved with all your imperfections and all your neurodivergencies, all your bad habits, all your physical conditions, mood imbalances, all your ticks and farting and huge pores—that you can be loved, even though your shoe size is bigger than the average shoe size of an average more or less female Homo sapiens.

Sometimes love can happen very fast; it can also develop over time. You are giving up all these things that you are vulnerable about, that you hide from yourself, that you suppress and avoid—you are giving them up step by step. This is how love grows from being just a meeting of two strangers. You uncover yourself, and you discover a different person; you accept yourself, you accept them, learn both your differences and your similarities. You remain autonomous, yet you are creating a certain union together as well.

But as with anything developing in time, it is also important to remember how not to let it become a habit—not to make it an automation that works by itself without your creative impact. Because automation actually kills the sincerity and the affectionate part of anything; it kills the bigger meaning and dilutes the importance, and can actually water down even such a saturated feeling as love.

And this is where love letters become important.

One never writes a letter to nothing. One can try, but then one might create something out of it.

A letter is not a diary note, not a general contemplation on a subject. A letter is something that has an addressee. At the very base of it, the act of writing a letter establishes a relationship.

To write a letter, one should take a pause, take oneself out of the automation of life, out of the ordinary mode, and live a moment of relating to another. By the very intention and gesture of doing so, one is already establishing meaning. By writing a letter—in any medium or form—one creates a document of this relationship, underlining that this relationship exists, contemplating on this relationship during the writing process, if not through it.

Love letters intensify the connection experientially. The very process of writing sets up the whole range of emotions: establishing, materializing the feeling of love in a body: with every letter that one writes with a pen, with every press on a computer clavier, with every movement—the relationship grows, gets imprinted, creates hormonal thunders and becomes even more real.

By writing a letter, and by making the decision to let the curves of a beloved name emerge from a pen, by licking the edges of an envelope, and dropping it into the unknown of the post box, one decides to establish a private, intimate connection that is much less praised by contemporary culture and remains unnoticed by algorithms. (is there even a “like” letter? is it a genre I do not know of?)

Another quality love letters have — they make a relationship at a distance possible. So even when your lover/friend/enemy (we love our enemies) is very far from you, nevertheless, a letter is a way you can reach them and you can continue this relationship at a distance, you can live through it, actualize it, make this other being more present in your life. And by reading this letter, they are also investing themselves and living through these feelings.

Love letters create these meaningful moments of disruption. They discontinue a process of automation and the feeling of being stuck in a loop. They help to maintain a connection in times when connections get diluted due to the constant need for self‑marketing. They let you support different types of unions, based on a deep and complex feeling of love. They let love find its intensified, living, and real form. They are much needed today.