I really thought I was going to get out of having to write one of these letters, but Anna, somehow sensing this, managed to track me down and gave me a week to come up with something. One week seems like plenty of time, unless you're a habitual procrastinator like myself. So here I sit, writing this letter three hours before it's due. Still, last night I thought about what I'm going to write; that must count for something.

The idea I came up with was that of letter-writing itself, and why we do it. In this age of e-mail, telephones, cell phones, pagers, and instant messaging, letter-writing has become a lost art, something now considered quaint. Can any of you remember the last time you sat down and penned a real letter to someone? I'm not talking about a quick e-mail exchange about how things are going at work, but a letter to a loved one in which you discuss your feelings, your opinions, your life.

I bring this up because the art of letter-writing was instrumental to the courtship of my wife. I'll spare you all the torrid details and give you the gist of it.

It started when my brother and his wife, who were living in Madison, Wisconsin, attended a Lamaze class with another couple. They started talking about mutual friends who had not yet settled down with anyone, and my name came up. The fact that I lived in Connecticut was immaterial when it came to the logistics of matchmaking. They knew I was coming to visit, and managed to get me to agree to a blind date. I figured I had nothing to lose. However, the date fell through, and all was forgotten.

Jump ahead a couple of months. I received a handwritten letter from a stranger in Madison. Turned out it was the would-be blind date. Charlynn politely introduced herself, and explained the circuitous route she took to obtain my address. She told me a little about what she did for a living and that she was looking to start a letter-based dialog with me. She wondered if I would be kind enough to write back.

I'm a software engineer by profession, but looking at my indecipherable handwriting, you'd think me a physician. In an act of compassion, I wrote my response on a word processor. We made the decision to correspond via snail-mail letters only; we were both poor and didn't know how far we were willing to let this go. It also somehow seemed safer. Yet communicating by letters forced us to carefully select our topics of discussion and the way we worded our thoughts. We didn't have the luxury of an instant explanation if our ideas were misunderstood. Believe me, this is very difficult to do, even with a few months' practice.

Char and I corresponded like this for about three months before we ever spoke on the phone. Let me tell you, we discussed more than the weather in those letters.

It's amazing how writing a letter about your beliefs and opinions focuses your thought process. You have to think the subject through before putting your ideas down on paper — a novel concept in today's world of instant feedback, I know. You need to anticipate your reader's questions and preargue your positions. You have to come to an internal understanding and comprehension of your subject matter before you can discuss it intelligently. You must reflect on your beliefs and ideals and make some hard decisions about exactly where you stand. All of this is also a part of opening up to someone else, but I found that doing it through letter-writing was beneficial to both of us.

Telling someone that you're falling in love with her and having to wait a week for a reaction is simultaneously maddening and satisfying. You're spared a possible instant rejection, but you have all week to think of things you might have worded differently, what the other person must be thinking of you, whether you should have said it, and so forth.

After our first conversation on the phone, I thought the letters might diminish in importance, but they continued to play an important role in our burgeoning relationship. We could follow up questions we had posed over the phone with a letter, one that contained a more extensively thought-out answer than would have been otherwise possible. I also considered those letters to be gifts that arrived once or twice a week. Yet even with our continued letter-writing, we seriously considered calling Sprint and offering to be poster children for high long-distance bills in exchange for a break on our monthly costs.

We finally met each other in person five months after our correspondence began. I asked her to marry me the next day. Eight years later, I'm still glad I answered that letter.

Unfortunately, as with most courtship rituals, the letter-writing slowly disappeared after our marriage began a year later. I feel it's time to reflect, in a letter, upon our wonderful eight years of marriage, our beautiful daughter, and to perhaps make some plans for the future.

Take my advice: Set aside the time to sit down and write a letter to a loved one. Trust me, they'll love it.

— Sean