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" A long time ago, when I was living in my favorite apartment behind a bamboo patch in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, I wrote my first love letter. I can&amp;#039;t remember what I was feeling, but it was big and it felt real. It was a liquid hot afternoon, and I was sitting on my screened porch, enjoying my boredom, thinking that I was full up with the very thought of her. I drew a pretty cool heart on a piece of newsprint, rolled that into a manual typewriter, and then pecked out about fifteen sentences. I took more than an hour. It had to. I couldn&amp;#039;t edit, and I couldn&amp;#039;t use White-Out. It worked, too. That woman was happy.  So happy she stuck it on the door of her refrigerator, where it clung to a magnet-laden collage of birthday cards, Easter cards, Thinking-of-You cards. This irked me. Every time I went in there I took my letter down. She thought I was embarrassed, but the truth is, I hated that cheap watercolor sea of candles and rabbits. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a love letter,&amp;quot; I told her. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s only for you. You&amp;#039;re supposed to save it. It&amp;#039;s supposed to be folded up in a book somewhere.&amp;quot; She didn&amp;#039;t get it. She treated it like a card, and that \u2014 along with smears of mayonnaise and weeks of sunlight blazing through the kitchen window \u2014 voided the letter for me altogether.  It should be pretty obvious that you don&amp;#039;t buy a love letter on Aisle 7 of the Piggly Wiggly. Leave the greeting cards on the rack. If what you want is a sentiment that you can buy, then what you&amp;#039;re feeling might not be love.  When it comes to writing a love letter, remember: it&amp;#039;s not a card. It&amp;#039;s a letter. First, sit. Letters take time. Letters have a rhythm. There are no bullet points. No clipping and pasting. Letters must be written, and writing takes a while. Three lines can&amp;#039;t do the work of three paragraphs. This is not to say your letter must be long. Length complicates things. Three paragraphs can do the work of three pages. Just give them some time. Don&amp;#039;t try to put the emotion itself in words. Better writers have tried. And do yourself a favor: don&amp;#039;t quote those writers. Say it yourself. You owe that much to the occasion of love.  Remember, the purpose of a love letter is to acknowledge. You&amp;#039;re creating a record of the previous four months, or two weeks, or that day or the very moment in which you find yourself. You acknowledge the object of your love, and you make that person feel seen.  Be loyal to the past you share. If your love emerged on a kayak trip, then you don&amp;#039;t just mention that experience, you make it. Use your memory. Let the river \u2014 the docks, the boats, the rocky shore \u2014 become your palette. Tell a story, one that only the two of you know. Or try narrating a moment in which she was unaware that you were watching her. Use detail to show what you remember and that you remember.  A good love letter declares itself plainly, then illustrates particularly. Let the example precede sentiment. &amp;quot;I saw you watching the men play chess in the park. So quiet. I love the way you look at things.&amp;quot; Show her what you love in her before you tell her what you love in her. Show, then tell. Don&amp;#039;t work to be overly genuine. Be clear. Earnestness is cheap. Too much of it throws off the alchemy of expression. Don&amp;#039;t feel obligated to wind up a spool of honesty. Clarity works better. Don&amp;#039;t repeat yourself. Emotional declarations matter more if you make them one at a time, space them a little. Even in a short letter, you must create room. With love, there&amp;#039;s value in scarcity. That&amp;#039;s why it feels like such a jackpot. Most of all, remember that it&amp;#039;s private, and therefore it can bear some risk. In this way most, a love letter is like love itself. There must be risk. Say something, name something, tell something that surprises you about yourself. Let her know that she is redefining your terms. And be sure she knows that one of your terms is that it&amp;#039;s not a card, not a collectible, not something for the fridge. Tell her you expect she&amp;#039;ll keep it somewhere so that one day she finds it in a book, or a drawer somewhere. Maybe you&amp;#039;ll be in the next room then. Maybe not. If you&amp;#039;ve done your job with the letter, then, as now, she will believe you. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/sex/advice/a7856/how-to-write-a-love-letter/>