Few emotions inspire us to put pen to paper, or finger to keyboard, more often than love. Yet few feelings are more difficult to convey in words than those that love inspires -- be they jealousy, longing, joy or sorrow.
Often what's intended to read like a Shakespearean sonnet comes off like a Viagra commercial or worse.
Two websites offer help to lovers who are struggling to put their feelings into words. The Love Letter Collection features nearly 70 love letters sent anonymously to the site's creator, Chicago installation artist Cindy Loehr. Oozing with raw feeling yet stripped of specific details that might reveal the sender's or receiver's identities, these letters are remarkably universal. "Every time I read one I think, is that written to me?" says Loehr.
Subscribers to Library Online, on the other hand, can employ the services of a modern-day Cyrano to put their feelings into better-sounding words than they ever could.
"A lot of people who struggle with letter writing can't make it flow," explains Library Online's president Emilie Johnston. "They have random thoughts thrown all over the place. We're piecing it together. We're giving you the flow."
The 3-year-old website offers dozens of love letter templates covering various aspects of relationships, including love at first sight, Internet courtship, apologies, long-distance, drifting apart, breakups and even secret romances.
Subscribers to the site, who pay an annual rate of $40, can download a letter, add their own personal touches and send it to their special someone who's none the wiser.
Johnston says many of her customers are non-English speakers seeking to improve the tone of their correspondence, though as of late she's seen a boost in military-based customers, too.
In some instances the company, which also offers a wide selection of business letters and career letters, will custom write a letter. One woman called upon Johnston for help with a 19-page breakup letter she was writing to her fiancé.
"I gave her letter flow, lining up sequential events," she recalls. "She was so happy with it she sent me a little stained-glass angel I could put on my window."
While the Library Online's love letters are left purposefully vague to serve a subscriber base in the thousands, those at the Love Letter Collection are more specific. They range from clichéd poetry -- "Every time I see your face / It takes me to a different place a place / where I long to hear your voice / I want to feel your sweet embrace." -- to prose so unique it couldn't be made up -- "If we were eels would we migrate together? I envision us intertwined riding the Gulf stream across the cool oceanic depths, a slipknot, a caduceus wand, writhing our way aloft on our private eddy of warmth."
Loehr says that although the site focuses on love letters, many of the submissions focus on longing.
"There's something that is desired that hasn't been received," she says. "The letter is an attempt to somehow express this need, to try to fulfill this need for a perfect relationship or whatever it is."
Authenticity is a top priority for both sites. Loehr rejects what she calls "junk submissions" -- letters that read like someone just dashed them out and hit the "send" button. She scans submissions for "a tone of sincerity that shows a person is invested in the letter."
For Johnston who, along with a team of freelance writers who support the site, needs to convey a range of deep emotions that can be universally applied, the task is more daunting. She often sends back letters submitted by her writers that sound too generic or similar to others on the site.
Sources of inspiration include interviews and "girl talk," as well as letters former President Ronald Reagan wrote to Nancy.
"They're unbelievably touching," Johnston says. "Ronald Reagan had the gift of writing."
The real trick to writing a good love letter, she says, is to imagine yourself in the lover's shoes. Johnston wrote many of the site's love letters while in the middle of her own romantic dilemmas, a factor that she says contributed to the authenticity of the prose.
"There I was writing my letters, tears rolling down my face," she says.
She adds, "The whole emotion has to be in the letter to convey exactly what the writer is feeling. I don't think anyone can write a love letter unless what they're feeling is real."
Johnston's aim is to help people express their feelings in writing while making a profit from it. Loehr says she hopes her collection will reassure people in the throes of love that they are not alone.
"Love can be this very intense experience, and sometimes you feel very alone in that," she says. "With this site we're bringing these (letters) to light so everyone can read them and think it's OK. This is what it means to be human."
