Magic Happens. Just Not On Dating Apps.
An ode to the love letter.
Do you want to know why dating apps suck? It’s not the flakiness, or the animal selfies, or the inane chit-chat, or the misogynistic bios, or even the boring bios.
It’s because there’s no magic.
A few years ago, my mom discovered a box of her great-aunt’s old love letters. Audrey, my great-great-aunt, died more than a decade prior, unmarried with no children in a nursing home. She had been widowed as a young woman and never remarried.
When I was in my early 20s, dying alone would have been the end of the world.
I mean, HELLO, dying is the end of the world regardless of whether you’re married or not. But when you’re young, dying is a totally foreign concept, and nothing to be feared. Being alone is not; it is something to be very, very afraid of.
In your early 20s, you are 100% certain that you will meet the love of your life, you’ll have happy, non-drug-addicted children, and you will grow old with your happy, non-cheating husband. End of story.
Then you turn 30 and you try to find love on a dating app.
And everything changes.
Audrey’s perfectly preserved letters dated back 60 years. They were thrown in a box, out of order, so it…