What do you do with old love letters?

I take them back up to the attic and hide them under the floorboards and never retrieve them again. Someday someone will appreciate them. Preferably after I am long gone.

I keep them, but my SO knows I have them. They are tucked away in a safe place along with other sentimental momentos.

Keep them. May be able to use them for blackmail someday!! Ha, I have several letters that my ex wrote to a girl that he was cheating on me with. I’ve kept them for over 20 years. Hmm, wonder what his new wife would think about them? (evil grin)

Keep them! I’m a very sentimental person, and, even if I don’t feel that way any more, the memories are always nice to relive, especially if it’s from my youth. Especially in this day and age, when letter writing is out of fashion, the memento of a love letter is particularly adorable. I’m a product of my age, and I’ve kept text messages and emails that I found particularly sweet – our version of the love letter – just for sentimentality’s sake. I’m sure your grandchildren would love to look at them one day.

So far no shreds. Interesting.

I sent mine back to my old gf just for kicks. She and I were 12 or 13 at the time and I sent them in our 20s. She was amused and noted her impatience in her youth. (Also, she sent them back.)

I say keep ‘em. Someday you’ll show your kid or grandkid this archaic thing called a letter.

I threw them down the trashshoot of my old apartment complex, along with the gifts, mementos, souvenirs, and jewelry from that relationship.

I’m insanely sentimental, almost to a fault, and for years I kept all of these letters, mementos, jewelry and ephemera from first dates tucked away in special boxes and places.

Over the past few years though, I’ve started to clear them out. I just feel like now that I no longer have a relationship with the person, the letters, trinkets, and gifts really don’t mean anything. I get no warm reaction to reading them, and I feel like they’re just taking up space. I give away the jewelry to younger cousins and nieces. There’s also the feeling that I am no longer the same person who received those letters, and the person writing them is also a different person, from the time and place in which they were written.

I never imagined I would be so unaffected by these things – even though some of them are truly beautiful. I’ll probably keep a few of them around, for the sake of grandkids, history etc.

I also found that as I’ve gotten older, I tend to give myself completely in relationships and don’t look back on the old ones, romantically. I’d hate for the person I’m involved with to think that I’m poring over those, or revisiting my feelings for someone who’s long in the past.

Burn them and bury the ashes

If it’s a really bad relationship (thank God I’ve only had one of those) I don’t keep anything. If it’s a good relationship, I keep almost everything. Letters, movie ticket stubs, pictures, flowers he gave me that I’ve pressed, gifts, jewelry, all that. The stuff from my first two relationships, from high school, are in a box in the garage at home, and the stuff from my last two relationships that I’ve had since I’ve been in college are in a box under my bed. Except for the pictures, which are on my computer :P
It’s nice to go back and read the letters that my last high school boyfriend wrote to me and look at our pictures from homecoming and prom. We haven’t spoken to each other in about 4 years, but the memories are nice.

You’ve done nothing wrong;
It’s part of your history;
Keep them for someone to enjoy and muse over one day in the far away future.

He wasn’t a writer. He liked to call. I had tapes of his messages on my Ansaphone that I’ve since destroyed. I still have a few photos packed away, a T-shirt that’s somewhere and a handmade vase from him. The latter is on my dining room table holding flowers right now.

I keep them. I have kept them. I still have them. And frankly, I read them sometimes and feel nostalgic. I don’t feel like it diminishes my current relationship in any way either. Someone cared about me once, they don’t anymore, but the letters can take me back and make those special feelings haunt me for a moment or two. It’s nice.

Burn ‘em. I mean, that is what a fireplace is for, right?
Burning old love letters?

I held onto some, from one relationship – it was my first “serious” one – honestly, I can’t find them now, though. Our last move a few boxes never seemed to arrive with the rest of us, I’m guessing they were in one of those boxes. It bothered me, my husband lost his “first love” items, too. A little bittersweet for both of us.

Any other relationship – I threw them away. No need to keep those.

I think that if I live to be 120, I shall not understand why people burn such documents or throw them away. I have precious little from my past, and my memory is very bad. Such things are all I have to remember what happened back then. I wrote so many letters, to so many people, and they are all filed by correspondent in my files. I will feel horrible if the house burns down.

That might be silly, because I have only looked at a few of them, at most, five times in my life. One old girlfriend gave me a copy of her diary from the time we were together, because she was giving the original to the daughter she had given up for adoption. I told her I thought she should keep a copy. I didn’t ask for one, be she gave me one, anyway. I read half of it, looking, of course, for mentions of me, of which there were far too few.

I just don’t see why anyone would have a problem with it. Why do people think it means you’re still hung up on the person? In my case, I guess it would be some ten people I was hung up on. No one could get jealous of that, could they?

So what’s the deal? What are people afraid of? Why shred them?

@daloon: That’s just one more reason I love you!

Ah Tits, what can I say? I know I’m not the first to say it, but it is so much fun to call someone “Tits!”

@daloon: That’s what I’m here for :)

@daloon – There’s no need to assume that people are afraid of something, some people just don’t hold onto as many things. It doesn’t make them any less of a person or any less feeling. It’s just a difference in how some people are, why assume they fear something?

I have memories, yes, they may eventually fail, but that’s part of life. Personally, I had every intention of saving my first set of letters, journals and everything else. I think it was my first true step into loving someone, other than family and it was important. It failed, miserably; however, we are friends now. We speak about every 3 weeks and his family stopped by to see us, about a month ago. It bothers me that those things are gone, there are things I would have loved to pass down. My daughter knew about these things, as well as my husband. Just like I knew of his.

As far as other ones, to me, they didn’t shape me in the way that the first love did. I’m also one that doesn’t hold onto every single last thing. I have a few pictures, but I don’t save tons of things. I save the things that really truly move me, but I don’t collect things. Not the letters, not all of those things.

Wait, I do have every single thing my husband has written me. I have the letters, the cards, emails, and my personal favorite, my post-it notes. I still have the very first one, marking the day in my journal, he ever gave me. I walked out from work, he had tried to call, but I was in a meeting. He left a note, “I can’t wait for our date, tonight.” It was our first date. Somehow, I just knew to hang onto that note.

I liked tits’ answer and I was going to say, Hey nice Tits. But I just gave some lurve instead.

@Standswithacane: I will accept lurve or compliments anytime! Thanks :)

I’ve only kept a few things from past relationships. I have a high school yearbook with an entire page filled up by a love letter, not going to give that up. I also saved a 3 page (loose-leaf notebook paper, front and back!) secret admirer letter I received in high school (I never did find out who sent it, and I still want to know!). Such flowery speech those high school boys had. A few pictures. All the jewelry my ex-husband gave me, because I intend to pass it on to our daughters. I say keep anything you find meaningful to your life, and toss the rest.

the right thing to do is probably put the back in the box and look at them in another 30 years’ time.

what I have done in the past is burn all of them, so the only “love letter” I have is a note on the fridge from my latest girlfriend.

@cak: I guess I assumed it because they are so meaningful to me, and the only thing I could imagine is that they wouldn’t want their current SO to see them. People here have said as much on other threads, and that is why I used the word “afraid.” Obviously, you’re right in that that is a big assumption, and people could throw things away just because they don’t hold onto things.

I keep my memories in objects. That’s why I collect things. Each thing reminds me of a time and a place and an action. Without those things, I would remember nothing. Or I would recall nothing. I guess the memories would be there, but I would have nothing to make me recall them.

So, for me, throwing out things is literally throwing out memories, and if you throw out memories, you throw out a part of yourself. Your past is what made you the person you are now. You learn from these things. It seems to me that if you throw out things of importance in your history, you are throwing out the history and the learning.

Now, people don’t have to store memories in object like I do. Still, it seems that it should be universally true that documents contain information that can not be recalled by anyone except those with an eidetic memory. I could be wrong, but that’s the way it seems to me.

Now, I know that a lot of people don’t want to be attached to things. They move, and they throw a lot of stuff away. Maybe all their stuff. I think that is symbolic of their wish to become a new person, and I think, that they have to become a new person when they throw their memories away. This bothers me. To me, it means there is something they don’t like about their past selves. Something, I imagine, that could hurt them. Hence, the reason I used “afraid.”

I am, no doubt, over the top on this. My wife writes lists. She has several lists going at the same time. I think she should keep them, because they document what she (and we) were doing at the time. Of course, our spending does a similar thing, but not in as much detail. I know every expense I’ve made by credit card since some time in the early 90’s. Looking back over that, I can remember where I went and what I did.

I think I still have every bank statement I received since I was 28. I’m not sure what they would tell me. I should go back and look, because, frankly, it is getting to be too much to store. I’ve got two file cabinets crammed full in the attic, and I need some more file cabinets, but am too old to get them up there.

Some day, I hope, I will write a memoir or novel, or maybe several. The odds that I will actually do that are around 10%, I’d say, but they are not negligible. I hope to use these old documents to help me remember. I also hope, that someday, my children may become interested in who I was, the way I was interested in my parents and grandparents. If they do, it’ll all be there, warts and all. There’ll be a lot of warts. I will probably be dead by that time, so they won’t think I’m too horrible a person; hopefully, just an interesting one.

@daloon: I’ll definitely read your memoir, especially if I’m mentioned :D

@TitsMcGhee: Oh yeah! You’ll go in it! Especially your name! In fact, I gotta write a story, some day, about a character with that name, who may, or may not be like you.

Tits McGhee. Maybe a female version of Philip Marlowe. Like Garrison Keillor’s version—“It was a dark night in a city that knows how to keep its secrets…”

@daloon: Lurve for dat dere Garrison Keillor reference :) As soon as you write the story, I’ll read it.

The case of the purple tray of doom

I was sitting in my office, contemplating getting a few whiskeys down to McShea’s. Against my better judgment, it being around ten in the morning, I decided not to try to raise my sorry ass out of the chair it was apparently stuck to. Paddy was surely sick of my meandering stories by now. Though he’d never said nothin. Just stood there polishing the glasses no one used, and nodding. He might not even have been listening, but you know how it is when you’re three sheets to the wind. You kinda don’t notice too much about anyone else. Your own problems are what mesmerize you.

It’d been days since I’d even sniffed a client, and longer since one had come through the door. Not that I’m ever oblivious to my surroundings. An old cop never loses that sixth sense for trouble. Still it was a bit of a shock to hear the door slam. There was a little drool trickling out my mouth as I lifted my head to take a gander at the office.

There she was! Close on six feet of Brunhildean woman. Head surrounded by a golden halo. Eyes as piercing as an assassin’s dagger. Legs that went from here to eternity and back again. But more than that, more than anything I had ever seen up until that day, it was the spectacularlness of those perfect twin capital domes sticking out at me, like no one’s business. Quadruple D, if they were bigger than a teacup.

As you might imagine for a man in my stage of life, it took me a while to take my eyes off them. Of course, with a rack like that, she was wearing something cut low and tight, so you could see the perfect sweep of the two mounds curving deeply down into the valley between them. You couldn’t have exposed more of that valley, if you’d only had a hankerchief to do it with.

I was imagining what it might be like to feel those mounds on my cheeks, to lift my lips slowly towards those perky cupolas sitting astride the domes. Letting other parts of my anatomy feel the swell enclose…

“Mr. McSherry?”

Her voice was silken and low, like a river of chocolate flowing through an emerald valley. It was like the music of the sirens, deep for a woman, yet feathered with sensual overtones, and perfectly and dryly toned. I closed my eyes just to savor the harmony wafting through the air as if carried by the perfume she was wearing.

“Mr. McSherry!”

This time her voice was more urgent. Like a drill sargeant. I snapped my face upwards to engage her eyes, and I nearly said “Yes, sir!” Stopped myself just in time. Managed to hold her gaze for a long, drawn out eternity, hoping the sweat on my upper lip and the drool on my shirt had somehow evaded her attention.

When you proper amount of eternity had passed, I opened my mouth. “Whook…” My voice sounded like an ancient crow waiting for death. I cleared my throat. “Who wants to know”

“Tits,” she said. I almost wondered if she were reading my mind (not that that would have been terribly difficult) and was about to say something really stupid like, “that’s clear, honey, but who are you?” When she continued,

“Tits McGhee.”

I paused a moment to take that in. Who would have named their daughter “Tits?” She had to have named herself that. I can admire that in a woman. It sure takes a lot of balls.

Then I said, “and what can I do for you, sweetheart?”

She too paused, as if wondering if she’d made a collosal mistake. As if she was deciding whether or not to turn around and walk out of that door, and out of my life. My heart stopped for a second, because I knew that if this dame… this woman left my life, there’d be nothing but crumbs and crusts for me for the rest of the time I was sopping up the suds, waiting for the angel of death.

“It’s not what you can do for me,” she said, “it’s what I can do for you.”

Again a silence. Like a chess match. Each player taking plenty of time to consider his next move. I decided to gather a little more information.

“Who do you think you are,” I finally asked.

It came out a bit more beligerant that I was really feeling, and I was trying to think of a way to cool it down, when she said, “I’m going to give you a free pass on that, Mr. McSherry, seeing as how you were taking a little snooze and were a bit surprised to see me here.”

Damn! She had seen the drool. And the nap.

“The first thing you need to know about me, Mr. McSherry, is that I’m a private dick.”

End of installment 1.

@daloon: I certainly do hope I make that impression! (And my eyes are green, ftw :P ) Quite talented you are, my dear. I love that you can describe both physical appearance and action/motion quite vividly without it crossing the line to campy. Lurve for sure.

Thanks, Tits. Any other details about your person or life that you care to share might get worked into the story. Green eyes are cool. Especially if they stab right through you.

What else would be helpful? (Oh, and you got the blonde hair right too :D )

How you walk, what you smell like, your attitude, what happens in a bar when you walk in, how guys on the street act when you walk by, and how you respond. It would be interesting, but it isn’t really necessary, since I can make up whatever I want.

Actually, what I really want to know is why the tray is purple, and what kind of doom does it bring, and why are you involved, and are you really a detective, or are you just saying so, and if you’re just saying so, what ulterior motive do you have, and if you can wrap poor Mr. McSherry around your finger, will he be destroyed by this, or will he attain some kind of satori? Also, what the hell is McSherry’s first name? No one every calls him anything but McSherry. And is there any significance to the similarity of his name to the name of the bar where he drinks, and, for God’s sake, how can I make my descriptions of the bar sound realistic, in particular, how the drinking goes, because I’ve never been much attracted to booze, so I don’t quite get it.

ALso, you can help by asking questions. Why is it like this? WHat is going on there? Do you believe the characters would act this way. That sort of thing.

[Mod says] Please take off topic chatter to PMs. Thanks.

Ive got an old love letter that came with a nice picture. I burned the letter and will soon post the picture on the internet because I am a jerk with a broken heart

Throw them away.. they hurt.