I've been yearning to write letters again
A few months ago, I was at a coffee shop for a small event I put together. A reading party where only 2 people showed up. Still, we had a fantastic time reading and chatting around lattes. On the wall mixed in with local advertisements, statements, and event calendars was an advert for a dating service where you send each other letters instead of swiping.
Naturally I signed up but it's now taken me two weeks to write a letter back. Part of it was extreme work and family issues that arose but the other was, what do I write??
As a child I was able to craft letters to my grandmother and family from camp and student fieldtrips with a mastery of words similar to that of an esteemed 19th century noblewoman who would write to her wayward brother that he must return home for the family estate was in jeopardy.
Okay yes that's a complete exaggeration but the feeling of writing a letter for the first time in over a decade was akin to that feeling. Unlike with text or even emails, you have to really think about what you are saying, and you deliberately think about each word in context and what you are trying to say to come across. You can't just edit a word out later after sending the message. You can't forget a letter as it sits on your desk. You can't be lazy in letter writing.
I found myself really missing the process. I wish my friends and I wrote letters. We have a Facebook message chat that has been going on since messenger group chats became a thing. Yet despite this super convenient form of communication, I rarely hear from some friends at all as they rarely check Facebook (which is more or less a good thing) and some friends when we spoke about if we could move to a new platform, were uninterested because they just want to stick to messenger and nothing else. Yet they rarely check it. In person we hang out without trouble but it's them in between communication that seems to be an issue. Even texts can take weeks for some people to respond. This can be chalked up to a lot of issues but definitely a problem I see is because we are not as queued into communication as we thought we were. We are glued to our phones but not actually talking. We are glued to apps like YouTube and Instagram.
Lately I would have calls with my closest friends once a week which has been really refreshing. Like those long phone calls, you had on a home phone. The best form of communication is not the most convenient but the one that requires you to slow down and listen with full attention. Texts are great for small reminders here and there and something that can be resolved in two sentences but for long term conversation it seems to be missing a lot more then I realized.
I decided that somewhere down the line, I needed to find a letter writing group. Doing a general sweep of the normal channels of information it turns out these groups they do exist, but it can be hard to find information about them as they all use IGs and Facebook with either no info (plus set to private) or they have not updated their IG in months up to years, so you have no idea if they are still active. The other issue for me personally is as a queer person, I don't want to stumble into a letter writing group with not so good feelings about someone like me where I can't be open about my life and other aspects were that may come up. I mean along the lines of "my partner, and I met at this club which is clearly a queer club/bar" and being open as thats part of my life in this example. Even in 2026, there are plenty of people in the USA and beyond that would LOVE to know my PO box for not so good reasons due to their feelings around the LGBTQIA+ community. Many of the letter groups I found on Facebook set to private didn't offer any guidance on what their rules of conduct are which adds to the difficulty.
I'll keep at this service for now but definitely a quest for 2026 is to find a letter writing group that sends messages to each other.