Love Notes

Today is National Love Notes Day. It's "celebrated" annually on the same date. This year, it happens to fall on Friday. It set me to thinking about the writing of not just love notes but more generally of letter writing.

Handwritten notes can convey more feeling and thought than typed or electronic messages.

An internet search reveals that the oldest known love note was allegedly written by an Indian princess (a person from the subcontinent of India, not a Native American) to an Indian king about 5,000 years ago.

At the university I attended, they had a note system whereby the men and women could communicate via written notes between dorms. (This was eons ago, long before cell phones, and our dorm rooms didn't have land lines in the individual rooms, only two public phone booths in the center of each floor, and those were always in high demand, especially on weekends, so that note system came in handy.)

Each dorm had a long box with compartments labeled with the names of the other respective dorms (four men's and four women's) along one wall in the first-floor center lobby. Throughout the day and especially the evening, students would drop notes they'd written to other students (men to women and women to men) into the appropriate compartment and then, around 10:00 p.m., students from the men's societies (organizations similar to fraternities) would run the boxes across the campus to the dorms and dump their contents on the floor of each dorm's center lobby. The students would exit their rooms when the note carriers arrived shortly after 10:00 and rummage through the piles of notes, hoping to receive a note from someone.

Some of the notes were requests from men for dates with women (the coward's way of asking for a date). Others were replies to such date requests. But some were notes between "committed," steadily dating couples. (One could usually identify the latter by the perfume lavished on them by their female authors. Or by females hoping to impress a man they were conspiring to one day wed.)

But in the latter kind of notes were expressed a lot of intimate, heart-felt sentiment and emotion. The personalities of their authors really came out. When things really got serious between correspondents, they often began saving their notes or letters.

Letter writing has become a lost art. Handwriting is no longer taught or is severely deemphasized. And why should it be taught? After all, we have texting and email and instant messaging. Why bother with handwriting at all?

People often do not bother to write thank-you notes for meals to which others have invited them or for favors done them. If they bother to thank their hosts at all, it's often merely a sterile, almost impersonal, text message or email message. So why bother with note writing? It's such a waste of time. And it's increasingly hard for those who have never been taught its importance in a civil society.

It's a scientific fact: handwriting provides greater exercise in thinking, focusing, and relating than typing!

A 2024 article in Scientific American magazine reported the findings of a study conducted at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Researchers concluded that students who took notes by computers "were typing without thinking" and without mentally processing the information they were hearing. But those who took notes by hand had to process and condense the information since they couldn't write it all down. That forced them to think--to prioritize, consolidate, and relate the information they heard to things they had learned earlier.

"Handwriting," the researchers discovered, "activated connection patterns spanning visual regions, regions that receive and process sensory information and the motor cortex." There is a definite connection between mental processes and the physical activity of writing by hand that doesn't happen when one is typing.

Moreover, handwriting was found to boost memory, increase focus, and incorporate more brain activity than does merely typing.

These facts make clear the importance of teaching handwriting skills at an early age. Although typing and similar technical communication skills are important in our time, we dare not lose out on something even more important by ignoring handwriting.

As you can probably tell, I'm old school. I write almost everything in longhand with actual pen and paper, even before typing a letter or an email. I do the same whenever I'm writing an article or a book. I even ignore the notetaking and reminder features on my cell phone in favor of a handwritten to-do list. And I've found that my writing is better when I do so rather than composing right on the computer screen.

On this National Love Notes Day, I hope that you will take the time to hand write a note or letter to someone, regardless of whether it is a love note. Give your brain and your hand a workout by expressing your deepest thoughts and feelings to a friend or someone you are concerned about. Secret within your spouses coat pocket or purse a short handwritten note telling them you'll be thinking of them today. Put a handwritten note in your child's bookbag or lunchbox, telling them you hope they'll have a good day. Show people you care in the most human way possible--by writing.

I also hope that you will consider a love note sent to you long ago, before that Indian princess wrote to her beloved king, and long before you were even born. Read the Bible. It's God's love note to mankind. In it, He wrote of His deepest feelings for not only mankind generally but also for you specifically.

The Bible is God's love note to us.

That note says, "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3:16).

He says that His feelings for us are so strong that He "commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom 5:8).

He asks us to "Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God" (1 John 3:1).

Moreover, He wants us "to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God" (Eph. 3:19).

No other note could convey such love as His. But He wants us to return His love with love for Him. In fact, "We love Him, because He first loved us" (1 John 1:9).

I was a participate in the note system at my university. I wrote notes to my future wife that were filled with sincere (maybe at times a little mushy) expressions of love. And I was among the scrum of guys around that pile of notes that came every night about 10:00 p.m., always hoping to find a note from her to me. And when I found one, I read it closely, looking for every nuance of love in return. In fact, I read them over and over.

Call me sentimental, but that's just how it was. And I still have most of those letters. If I took time to read them now, I'd surely gag at the syrupy mush we wrote to each other. But those notes were the beginning of what turned out to be 48 years and counting together.

Now handwrite your own note to someone, expressing your appreciation of them or offering a word of encouragement. You'll make a difference in someone's day because they'll know that you took the time and thought to write to them.