‘Sent With a Loving Kiss’: Letter Writing and Platonic Love Across Three Generations of Women
By Laura Griffin
Valentine’s Day, a holiday that crosses many lines of gender, religion and politics, sees twenty-five million cards sent in the UK alone every year. Love it or hate it, it’s a fixture of the calendar we all contend with to some degree.
I’ve had Valentine’s Days that passed noticed only by its absence, with a partner who would wax lyrical on the holiday’s commercialisation in an attempt to explain away his coldness and sometimes casual cruelty. I’ve had Valentine’s Days where I had roses delivered to my work desk, a refreshing moment in a short-lived affair with someone who is now a good friend. I’ve had Valentine’s Days where I’ve recreated (mostly for my own amusement) the opening credits scene of Bridget Jones’ Diary, whilst wondering who I had to bribe to get Colin Firth’s deliciously awful Christmas jumper.
The one major ingredient that was never absent in my adult dalliances with this day was the card I would always receive from my ‘secret admirer’. They were cards stating that ‘you are my lobster’, or that they loved me ‘more than [Brooklyn 99’s] Terry loves yoghurt’, and a sentient coffee cup telling me earnestly ‘I love you a latte’. It’s an open secret that it’s my younger sister, who always writes SWALK (or ‘Sent With A Loving Kiss’) on the back of every envelope as an echo to the golden, pre-email days of letter writing.
My mother also sends me a card under the same loose cloak of anonymity. Her card of two dachshunds touching noses under a heart currently sits on my study shelf and continues to grow yellow over years of southern-facing sun. My sister, however, really stole the show this year after sending a card showing Oscar Wilde (a hero of mine) with the statement that my not-so-secret admirer was ‘Wilde about [me]’. This is now the high bar any future romantic Valentine will have to clear.
These cards are not only a lovely opportunity to have something in the post beyond adverts and bills – it’s also a little bit refreshing to remind oneself of the importance of platonic affection. It’s warming knowing that someone is thinking of you at a time when being single feels very starkly underlined. It’s comforting to know that someone took the time and expense to find, write and post a card that will brighten this soggy day in February, sending you physical proof of love that you can keep long after the red roses are thrown out to the compost heap. It’s nice to indulge in a tradition of celebrating love in all its other forms – whether it’s a fierce, sisterly bond; a proud maternal love; a love that, whilst strained, still has good bones under it; or affection that can only privately bloom once a year before necessary boundaries rise up again. Platonic love in its infinite variety is more complicated and real than any Hollywood ending.
It's not a completely uncomplicated tradition in my family. My grandmother is a small Yorkshire woman whose baking and cooking skills border on the magical and heretical. We have always had a very strong bond through afternoons talking about Shakespeare, reading detective novels in dappled summer sunshine, and many evenings trying to win any points on University Challenge (we once got 10 questions right between us, which we were very proud about). She also has never really understood the way that I love in my small, queer life. Being a sheltered housewife in rural Yorkshire for most of your life tends to do that to you. Whilst she is never openly hostile, it’s something that we never discuss and uncomfortableness invariably creeps into a relationship that was always built on openness.
Whilst the way my heart beats will never be understood in this quarter, my love for this lady leads me every year to send her a Valentine’s card. It’s a cheap but appreciated echo to the first card my late grandfather sent to her when she was a seventeen-year-old lass from Wetherby. I add something literary to let her know it is me and not an amorous member of the local golf club, and I post the card deep in the wilds of Lincolnshire with love that has been built for over thirty years, but which now has certain safeguards.
Platonic love is like any love. You have to engage with and ask how it builds you up or tears you down in order to nurture the parts that nourish both parties. In the same manner that you would never go into a bookshop in order to buy oranges, my love does not seek out certain things it will never receive from my grandmother. My heart has had to grow strong enough to know itself, and brave enough to seek from willing others what it needs to thrive.
Just because a relationship is platonic does not make it above appraisal. There have been friendships that I have ended or left to naturally wither away that have left me with a profound sense of freedom akin to ending things with an unsuitable lover. Sometimes it’s for the best for both of us – and it makes the platonic loves that stay all the more special. The meetings after months apart where conversation flows as though we’d seen each other daily; the pre-rehearsal pints as we debrief from the working week before making fools of ourselves onstage; the silent reading sessions in the garden over countless cups of tea and stolen slices of buttered bread and cheese. It’s a blanket that my life would be colder without, and one that a lover would not be able to replace entirely.
In much the same way that many people say that we shouldn’t need a special day to tell our partner that we love them, I would say that we shouldn’t need a Galentine’s Day to celebrate our platonic relationships either – especially the written down kind that future historians will delight in reading with careful kid gloves, marvelling that even in dark, uncertain times we put pen to paper to express love in a more lasting way. Especially if it is ‘Sent With A Loving Kiss’.