Ten Years Later, We Still Send ‘Love Letters’ Every Day
How my husband and I cope with having opposite schedules
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Today, Katie Couric’s Wake-Up Call newsletter is featuring an essay from Jamie Stelter, traffic anchor & co-host of NY1’s “Mornings On 1,” on the daily love letters she and her husband Brian send each other.
“goooooood morning, my love! T-minus 10 days til our trip! hope you’re sleeping soundly.
sunny is sleeping well… story started fussing at 10 and sunny shouted ‘story, i’m trying to sleep!’ — it was adorable — so I picked him up and soothed him. sut right now he’s okay.
how’s the love letter essay coming along? can I help with it some more?”
It’s going well now that you just gave me my lede! Thanks, honey.
That was part of the love letter Brian wrote me on Sunday night before he went to bed. It was the first thing I read when my alarm went off at 2:40 a.m. on Monday. His email is the first thing I read every morning — normally when he’s lying next to me in bed, fast asleep. We started writing to each other when we were dating, almost 10 years ago now, before we officially shared a bed or a home or had two tiny humans.
I do the traffic on the morning news, so I have to be in the hair and makeup chair at 3:30 a.m. I’ve had these hours for basically my entire career (10 of which have been at NY1); I wouldn’t trade them for the world. I’m a morning person. Brian… not so much. He anchors a show on CNN every Sunday morning and writes a newsletter six nights a week, which usually publishes around midnight. Then, he gets to work on his love letter.
The emails have changed quite a bit over time, but we’ve never stopped writing them. And we’ve never stopped calling them love letters. Brian estimates that we’ve written about 600,000 sweet words back and forth.
Of course, some days are sweeter than others. What started as flirty emails full of song lyrics and plans for movie and dinner dates have morphed into diaries of our lives and, sometimes, workmanlike hand-off notes — full of kids’ antics, babysitter logistics, and Amazon orders. “Can you make sure they send up my Rent the Runway deliveries?” “Don’t forget to get that approval from PR for…
