Three One One: Receipts

Here in an age of social media, screenshots, and "bringing the receipts", do you think that anyone with a proper sense of self-preservation would ever write a significant other a love letter? The risks seem far too high.

Social media, screenshots, and the ease of forwarding emails and scanned documents would all seem to be things that would kill the love letter.  Yes, of course letters could always be found by those other than an intended recipient. A recipient could share the letters with others. There's a trope from how many stories and novels--- the cache of love letters found hidden many years later, the ribbon-tied letters that solve a mystery or dissolve a marriage. But social media makes "bringing the receipts" so much easier.

And who could risk that? Love letters show you at your most vulnerable. Love letters reveal what you feel, what you need and want in your life. Any love letter that's the least "erotic" or "hot" risks revealing your particular desires, fetishes, obsessions. Worse, possibly, it reveals whether you're capable of writing erotica competently...which isn't a universal skill. Inept erotica leaves you open to derision just as much as being seen to have any non-vanilla desires. 

Derision of course is the real fear here. If a relationship goes bad and you've left "receipts", you are at serious risk. Any professions of passion or love or desire that you've made can be used against you. Any failure to describe anything sexual with perfect literary and political grace can be used as a sign that you're equally incapable of in-real-life performance, And as I noted above, the slightest hint of any non-vanilla desires can be used to show that you're clearly either pathetic or creepy.

I suppose it doesn't even have to be a risk for after a relationship ends. You're always at risk during the relationship itself. Is the recipient sharing your emails and letters with her friends? Are they sitting together and drinking wine and mocking what you've written? Or, here in a pandemic year, are they forwarding emails and screenshots and scans of letters to one another for round-robin dissection and derision? You'll never know, or you'll only know too late. Leaving any trace of yourself for others to dissect is a risky thing, and all the more risky if anything emotional is involved.

Now I do have to ask myself if this particular fear isn't the male equivalent of the fear women have that ex-boyfriends are circulating the nudes that they sent during the relationship. Women don't send me nudes, so the issue isn't something I've had to face in my own life--- I've been trained all my professional life for discretion, and I'm not about to circulate  anyone's deeply personal gifts to me. Still...I do wonder if the two fears aren't equivalent.

I do take it as a given that any revelations to a lover are dangerous, and growing more so. And I take it as a given that no group of women have ever discussed the boyfriend of a group member without subjecting him to contempt and derision. Even if I'm wrong about that, the possibility is always there. And "receipts"--- meaning any letters, any emails, anything that reveals anything about your feelings and hopes ---make you an easy target.

I've always said that love letters were an art that I admired. And, yes, sending deeply passionate love letters is something I wish people still did. I wish that we could still talk about desires and experiments and adventures with lovers and potential lovers. We can't, though. To have desires, to imagine romance and passion--- those things are no longer acceptable. Those things leave you open to mockery as inept, creepy, pathetic, sad. 

There are antique skills that I miss, and I suppose that love letters have joined the list of things I won't be trying again.