First published in ‘The Guardian’, 29 January 2023
I wrote my first love letter in 1973. I was thirteen years old. First year of high school. His name was Trevor. I wrote it very neatly in blue biro on a piece of lined foolscap paper, folded it up into a small square and sent it to him during class.
‘Dear Trevor,
I like you very much too. Since Wednesday you showed you loved me, but then on Friday (just because I threw a stone and didn’t mean to hurt you) you started telling everyone you hated me, grinning nown again and me not knowing what it means. I’m writing this letter to ask you to love me again.
Elly xx’
Trevor read my letter, turned the paper over, briskly wrote his response in pencil and sent it back to me.
‘Dear Elly,
I think I will love you again, the stone did hurt. Please tell me why you threw this stone at me, if you tell me why I will love you again.
Trevor xoxo’
Thanks to Trev having been so conservative with his paper usage, today I have testament to both his and my correspondence and it effectively set the template for my future romantic life: He professes his love upfront. I respond tentatively at first and then lay my guts on the line. I over-think what he may or may not be feeling. I apologise for provoking a response. I anticipate rejection and judgement. And then I round it off with what my father used to call, ‘emotional begging’. My father also told me that I was more likely to get run over by a bus than meet someone after I turned fifty.
I went on to write a few more love letters in my time. Some during those early giddy days of mutual limerence. Others after I had been dumped – what lengthy impassioned arguments for the defence those were! The power-relationship between dumper and dumpee always works the same way, irrespective of whatever history leads up to the final break. In 1984 I received a love letter, or rather a love postcard, every day for a month. They were like daily clues to a cryptic crossword from someone who only ever identified as ‘Love from the Toucan Club’. When they stopped, I’d felt a little sad.
Is a love letter still a love letter if the recipient doesn’t know who it’s from? What about if the letter is never sent to its intended recipient and remains like a journal or diary entry? I was a dedicated diarist for years but stopped when I went public, so to speak, and started to publish my memoir pieces on the radio and in books twenty-years ago and only a few months after my son was born. Lots of those early pieces were about him.
Susan Sontag said that it’s ‘Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts. In the journal I do not express myself more openly than I could to any person: I create myself.’
Perhaps we have the chance to create ourselves anew every time we fall in love like every time we travel to another country?
My boyfriend and I met a few months before Victoria declared a State of Emergency. We were both on the cusp of turning sixty and only nine days apart. Astrology: bah humbug! He read my palm: woo-woo but weirdly sexy. I’d promised myself and anyone who cared that I would never ever be in another relationship. My last one, though short, had crippled me. I was done. But then he went up north. In his van. To ‘chase the waves’. A surfer: who would have thought? When the NSW boarder closed, he got stuck and wrote me love letters. Not much else to do on your own in a van once the sun goes down and you’re living off the grid and out of range during a pandemic. Sometimes he’d call if there was a signal and read his letters to me over the phone. I liked his voice. We exchanged lots of stories. Falling in love is a necessary and divine sort of a fiction filled with denial and a fair bit of self-deception, especially at the beginning. Eventually my Odyssean surfie returned.
So unaccustomed was I to being in a relationship with someone securely attached, I kept on looking over my shoulder for red flags I’d missed or on the lookout for early signs of withdrawal or rejection. Why was this relationship working? How could it be so easeful and without drama? I mean, he’s so securely attached he gave me carte blanche to write this piece! ‘Tell them you keep on trying to dump me, but I won’t let you.’ Mostly, anxiously attached people like me get together with others anxiously attached or avoidants. It’s hard to accept that anyone will hang around once one’s imperfections puncture the fantasy. It’s all very well for Esther Perel to reassure us that ‘a good relationship is the ability to see its flaws and still hold it in high regard,’ but could I find the wisdom at sixty to resist re-enacting my prior relationships and to simply allow the light to shine onto the folly of my neuroses. What if we fall in love hoping we won’t find in another what we know is in ourselves – all the ugly, embarrassing, dumb, shameful bits – how is it possible to keep on loving when they start to exhibit those bits too?
He and I had met briefly in our mid-twenties working at a youth drop-in centre. I remember he was handsome, rangy and remote. He remembers the day we took a bunch of recalcitrant teenagers rock climbing I’d worn a long black dress that made it hard for me to get up into the bus let alone climb a rock. Thirty-five years later we met again at a mutual friend’s party. I had heard his wife had died. They were together a very long time. I have never been in a relationship with a widower. There’s often an ex or two shadowing any new relationship but this was different, delicate, a new sort of balancing act. We talk about her. It’s important to continue to talk about those we have loved and lost, to acknowledge they shall always be a part of who we are. That he and I have both been so close-up to death and dying is not a necessary compatibility, but it is a good one. He tried internet dating for a bit and says that dating for the first time in thirty years and since his wife died was like enduring a series of job interviews. ‘It’s like we were measuring each other up like products. You know, evaluate, consume, discard, replace. Capitalism’s got a lot to answer for.’
We don’t live together. Apparently, an increasing number of people who get together later in life are choosing a relationship known as LAT (living apart together). I live in the country, and he lives in the city.
My parents separated when I was seven – after marrying each other twice! – but Dad was still full of relationship advice right up until a few months before he died and met my boyfriend for the first time. ‘I like this one,’ he announced loud enough for the whole aged-care joint to hear. ‘He’s a real man. Be careful you don’t get fat, or he’ll leave you.’
What do love letters look like today? Has everyone’s access to the spurious democratic forms of self-presentation and confession on social media rendered the truly personal and private redundant, weird even? A young friend of mine tells me that no one she knows really writes love letters like what I’m talking about but that ‘even if it’s a text or a DM or whatever, it’s still a love letter, I guess, and you know it when you see it.’
I’m not sure what happened to Trev and me in 1973. We were thirteen so probably not much.