What’s the point of a love letter? You want to express emotion, persuade someone to get closer to you, and move the relationship forward. Love letters generally aren’t handwritten notes on scented paper anymore. They’re texts, voice and video messages, emails, or notes with your Amazon-sourced Valentine’s Day gift.
Love isn’t the only emotion that brings people together, though. After a serious illness or trauma, maybe the kind of “letter” you want to write to a loved one centers on hope, gratitude, and joy.
Why write?
Brad Buchanan is a cancer survivor, published poet, and author of the book Living with Graft-versus-Host Disease. His new book, which will be finished next year, is From Warrior to Healer: Transforming Illness and Trauma Through Writing. As Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at California State University in Sacramento, Brad spent a lot of time nurturing student writers. He developed ways of helping them feel capable and confident in written expression.
Being in close touch with members of support groups for cancer survivors woke him up to a new possibility: bringing his teaching skills to other survivors so they, too, could benefit from the therapeutic value of writing—not just to themselves, but also to their partners.
“I think the shared experience of written communication can help a couple restore intimacy,” Brad says.
“Writing can help us heal from physical and emotional trauma, as well as enhance our wellness, but it can also be a lifeline. The fact is that when I was in active treatment, facing the next medical ordeal, or coping with terrible news about my cancer(s) coming back, I was writing for survival. Without writing to get me through each and every dark hour, I don’t know how I would have been able to face each new dawn as I did, and still do: with a sense of hope and expectation that life holds infinite possibilities for wonder and joy.
“Sharing this kind of hopeful writing with a partner is a way to restore a sense of intimacy. You have the same vocabulary to describe how you’re moving forward, focused on physical and emotional health.”
Barbara Perry and Harry Hutson are “hope experts” in the context of a work environment. Their focus is on collective hope—the kind that’s a vital force in a project team, for example—although some of their insights are applicable to energizing hope within a relationship.
What to write
In their book Putting Hope to Work, they identify the elements of hope as possibility, agency, worth, openness, and connection. In considering how they might shape your “letter” (whatever form it takes), here are my thoughts on what you might touch on:
- Possibility—the potential you see to strengthen your relationship and repair damage of the past.
- Agency—the sense of common cause and the power to influence your future together.
- Worth—all the things that are right in your life together—wine and cheese, golf, sex.
- Openness—your willingness to talk, to be honest, to send love “letters” (yes, a loving text counts).
- Connection—your value of each other’s contributions to the relationship, whether it’s unloading the dishwasher or paying the deductible on your health insurance.
Written communication has power. The words you say in a conversation may linger in the air and in your brain for a while but having words on a page (or screen) can live with you—in the drawer of a bedside table and on your Apple Watch.
Express yourself to your partner—in writing—to sustain and restore the intimacy in your relationship.
