All love letters are ridiculous.

Writing love letters still matters.

It takes a certain courage to write a love letter. Courage to stop. To choose paper, not too thick, not too pretentious, and, ideally, not torn from a notebook. To accept the delay of the first stroke of the pen and admit, without emojis or a delete button, that we feel something for someone. And that these vulnerabilities will be exposed for (almost) ever, in written proof.

Of course, it's a strange gesture in 2026. And perhaps that's why it's so powerful.

Writing love letters is an act of resistance. Against haste. Against distraction. Against the modern idea, no pun intended, that our entire lives fit on a pocket screen and disappear in 24 hours.

Joan Didion wrote that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Love letters are precisely that: small private narratives to survive distance, time, and, often, ourselves. The difference is that here the narrator is dangerously involved in the story.

A letter doesn't need to be a beautiful text, but it should be an honest thought.

The School of Life often reminds us that love doesn't die from lack of intensity, but from lack of clarity. A letter can clear up misunderstandings. You can't hide everything behind irony or the best sticker ever.

The sheet doesn't react. Feedback isn't immediate. It doesn't reply with a “seen at 22:43”.

There's an immensity of paper left to fill. Then come the days until we find time to go to the post office, stick on a cut-out stamp, wait. And, with luck, receive a reply. And yes, that's scary. But it's also liberating.

Humour helps. A lot.

Here we are fans of English humour: dry, self-aware, and with a slight self-consciousness. A good love letter doesn't need to sound like Shakespeare who came home drunk at three in the morning. It can admit insecurities. It can laugh at itself. It can say: “I'm not very good at this, but I swear I'm trying.” That, often, is better than any corny metaphor about a heart on fire.

Fernando Pessoa used to say that all love letters are ridiculous. They are supposed to be. Pretending they're not usually goes wrong.

In a world where we are overwhelmed by the digital, saying something well thought out, slowly and deliberately has become almost an emotional luxury. You don't have to write well. You have to write the truth. A love letter doesn't solve everything.
But nowadays it's an almost radical form of affection.

And yes, the paper matters.

A good set of stationery doesn't write for us, nor does it guarantee happy endings. But it creates the right setting.

Our letter writing sets exist for that. Not to distract. To accompany what is already there, the will of the gesture for the other, to say something that doesn't fit on a screen. If it's on good paper, carefully chosen, then even better.