THE WASHINGTON POST: The internet is overflowing with unsent love letters

In 2023, Gabe Szeto and his girlfriend broke up. Regardless of his friends pushing him to move on, “I couldn’t get over her,” Szeto recalls. “I had to put my memory somewhere.” A year later, he built an online map of London, which he began populating with recollections of their relationship.

“we walked along the thames and came here after Eat Tokyo. it was just us. when someone mentions golden hour I still think about this time with you,” he wrote under the handle AMOU-Starry-Sky-001 in a post located at Hammersmith Bridge. “i still remember your eyes looking towards the sunset.”

Szeto intended to store memories of only him and his ex-girlfriend on the website, which he called A Map of Us. “It was just me and her, so the world was just two people,” he says. But soon Szeto zoomed out from London and wondered, “What would it look like if the entire world had memories?” More than 300,000 users have since joined him.

A Map of Us became one of many popular repositories, like Craigslist missed connections, PostSecret.com and the Unsent Project, brimming with digital love letters. According to Google Trends, searches for A Map of Us have nearly tripled over the past year. Meanwhile, volunteer moderators struggle to keep up with the volume of love letters received.

The oldest love letter appears on a clay tablet, dating to 2029 B.C. Such an enduring tradition was bound to appear online. But the letters on websites like Szeto’s are different from their predecessors - they are posted publicly by anonymous senders, occasionally addressed to a person by name.

On Craigslist missed connections, users write about an encounter with a stranger, capturing un coup de foudre in a few words. “Every post is its own small universe,” says Ilia Blinderman, 39. He analyzed 10,000 such posts, perhaps to understand his own failures to connect, he says. There was also a voyeuristic appeal of this Craiglist section, which combined with his background in psychological research, made the promise of a large data set too tempting to ignore.

“If you have this expansive feeling in you,” Blinderman explains, “the only way of doing right by it is sending it off somewhere.” Across genders and sexualities, Blinderman found the most common phrase used is “eye contact.” Men post far more often than women do. Although when women post, their messages tend to be longer.

Blinderman posted a couple of missed connections himself: “Girl in blue/white floral dress on N train headed uptown at 9pm Monday” and “Cute brunette girl reading who shared my table at The Bean on Monday.” In some sense, Blinderman’s baring of his excitement about another person makes him vulnerable. But the recipient does not have to reply. They may not ever see it.

The transient nature of these missives are reminiscent of Haruki Murakami’s “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning.” In the short story, there exists a girl perfect for a boy, who is perfect for her. “Without a word they passed each other, disappearing into the crowd. Forever,” wrote Murakami. “A sad story, don’t you think?”

But the beauty of Craigslist missed connections, says Blinderman, is that “there is no mechanism that would make someone self-conscious.” Users are anonymous and do not receive comments on their posts. Unlike mainstream social media channels, which are growing more regimented, Blinderman describes missed connections as freeing.

Szeto built A Map of Us to avoid feeling exposed. “I wanted a way to reach out to someone,” Szeto, now 22, recalls thinking as he formulated the site. “They would know that it was written by me, and it was written for them.” At the same time, a user could retain plausible deniability. He adds, “You can always say that you didn’t write that message.”

Shifting romantic norms

Szeto explained that digital life has shifted romantic norms toward feigned apathy. A direct message to a romantic prospect is too forward, Szeto says, and puts him at risk of being ghosted. “The alternative is you go see them in person, and that’s a no-no,” he adds.

Jennie Rosier, a professor at James Madison University, studies the evolution of communication in romantic relationships. She says the line of thinking goes, “If I said it in-person, then I would be viewed as too much.” This too-muchness risks rejection.

“Gen Xers and millennials have long thought, ‘If you feel it, say it,” Rosier says. But for Gen Z, this instinct is trumped by a fear of discomfort. She posits helicopter parents and technology may have raised children less accustomed to distress. The result is a generation apt to manufacture an identity of hyper-independence, while keeping their desires for closeness a secret.

This desire is reinforced by romantic relationships that demand carelessness and punish kindness. Young people find themselves lost in “situationships,” undefined relationships that reflect calculated avoidance and shield a couple from the vulnerability that commitment requires. As Lisa Wade writes in American Hookup, neither men nor women feel “free to love” as they once did. The prevailing culture demands pretending uninterested in romance lest seeming desperate.

That said, rejections have yet to vanish. They just take on a different character for Gen Z, as Paul Eastwick, host of the Love Factually podcast and professor at the University of California at Davis, explains. “If somebody went about dating throughout their young life, mostly using online tools, they would probably have a sense of being anonymously rejected by many people,” Eastwick says.

“Without the online tools, if you’re going to be rejected, it’s more visceral because it’s face to face. But you also don’t feel like you’re being rejected by thousands.”

Safety in numbers

And yet online actions feel safer, according to Gabriel Rubin, a professor at Montclair State University who studies risk aversion. This is especially true on sites already full of letters; users are made to feel sheltered by the existence of a group.

In 2015, Frank Warren hoped to provide senders the same emotional safety. He started PostSecret, a project where senders would mail him postcards divulging their deepest secret. He promised anonymity, and it worked. More than a decade later, Warren is still receiving dozens of letters each week, unaddressed to anyone in particular. In total, he’s received more than 1 million postcards from around the world. He publishes them online at PostSecret.com.

“When we think we’re keeping a secret, that secret’s actually keeping us. It could be because of embarrassment or shame, or stigma, or misunderstanding,” explains Warren, who adds that most secrets deal with intimacy and connection.

“By visiting the website, you can see so many secrets from strangers. You realize that no matter what your secret is, there’s somebody out there who’s carrying that same burden, too,” he continues. That alone, he says, can create a sense of liberation or, at the very least, relief.

Warren is also tasked with answering readers, who are convinced a person they know sent a certain secret. Warren declines sharing the postmark on the back of the card. He tells them, “I advise you to imagine the postmark says whatever will make your life more interesting.”

Communication breakdown

It’s natural for readers to look for glimpses of themselves while perusing the internet’s love-filled postcards, missed connections, geotags and unsent letters.

Since it began in 2015, the Unsent Project has received 11 million submissions. According to founder Rora Blue, moderators approve an average of 7,000 submissions each week. Contributors can address their missives to a first or last name.

When Andrew Chan, a 27-year-old venture capitalist and content creator, came across the Unsent Project, he searched for his first name. “Andrew” pulled an overwhelming number of results, so he went for “Chan” next. “There were a couple that felt like a personal attack,” he says.

Some posts like, “I’m sorry for not communicating. I’m here if you would still have me” seemed spot-on to Chan. (Communication was one of his previous relationship’s challenges.) Others like, “Thank you for everything you did for me,” Chan remarks, are “vague, but hit just right.”

He says reading the letters is heartbreaking but, “You want to experience those emotions. You want to process them. You want to feel human.” On the Unsent Project, he could play out an alternate world, where his relationship went in the right direction.

At the same time, submitting posts to the site is a kind of letting go - a way “to take that emotion, process it, and release it into the world,” Chan says. He compared submitting posts to the emotional catharsis of slam poetry or speaking to deceased loved ones through a wind phone.

The irony, of course, is that many of these problems would be “fixable if they were sent directly to a person,” Chan says.

“The world would be a lot better if everyone said what they needed to say,” agrees Szeto. “People are embarrassed. People are scared.”

Szeto holds that A Map Of Us was not about pining for his ex-girlfriend. “It was about me moving on, my memories, which just so happened to be with her,” he says.

But when he describes the memory he tagged to Hammersmith Bridge, he slips. A part of him hopes she visits A Map of Us, searches for the bridge and reads the letter he left. He says, “If this place did mean something to her, she would go back to this point. She would know that it was written for her, even if no one else in the world knows that it was me.”