-OpEd-
BUENOS AIRES — Do young people write love letters these days? I asked Ada, my top source on Gen Z quirks and habits.
Yes, she said, but you can only be cheesy or “cringe” in an email or on paper — never on WhatsApp or social media. Email is already so vintage and folksy, she explained, that for 20-year-olds it lowers their barriers of judgment and allows themselves to give free rein to exaggeration.
Declaring your endless love by any other means puts you at risk for either ridicule and “ghosting” — an abrupt end in communications without explanation, notably online. I imagine ghosting by email hurts less, because you’ll never know whether or not your email was ever opened and read.
Gen Z still has emotions
It is not easy telling a love story, as it is a classic terrain for clichés. I am working on a book on the subject and have been researching where people stand today on the “communication” of love.
I liked Ada’s answer, as it is generally thought that Gen Z goes through life without correspondence or personal diaries, in which they can confide their secret passions. I am delighted, or relieved, to know that even today people cannot resist the temptation or need to record the emotion of love.
“All love letters are ridiculous,” the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa wrote. And, judging by some compilations by famous artists, he’s right. The letters between Mexican painters Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera are full of metaphors and praise that are at times intolerable, especially for those who have ditched patriarchal romance.
50 shades of bland
That may be why my favorite of Kahlo’s letters is the one she wrote as a farewell before having her leg amputated: “I’m writing to let you know I’m releasing you, I’m amputating you. Be happy and never seek me again. I don’t want to hear from you, I don’t want you to hear from me. If there is anything I’d enjoy before I die, it’d be not having to see your f*cking horrible bastard face wandering around my garden. That is all, I can now go to be chopped up in peace. Goodbye from somebody who is crazy and vehemently in love with you, Your Frida.”
His letters would be evidence of “sexting” that would to perk up the sleepiest of juries.
That, for me, is real love, requiring no verbal ornaments to explain its contradictory nature.
At the other extreme is Irish novelist James Joyce, whose shamelessly explicit honesty with his lover Nora Barnacle (“my sweet little whorish Nora”) is, if nothing else, surprising. While he sends her “a hundred thousand kisses” at the end of one letter, phrases like “fuck me in your dressing gown (I hope you have that nice one)” are among the milder imagery he conjures, writing in the first decade of the 20th century. He asks her repeatedly (as he did in 1909) to forgive “this filth” (assuming she was offended), but “it seems that this too is part of my love.”
Imagine the trouble Joyce would get into these days. His letters would be evidence of “sexting” that would to perk up the sleepiest of juries, and make modern love culture seem like 50 shades of bland.
