Remembering my first pen pal

As a boy, I often visited my grandmother and her husband, Charlie, at their home in the Jamaica section of Queens, New York. It was a chance to catch up with family and meet new friends, including some of Charlie’s relatives from Hialeah, Florida.

During one visit, I met a girl named Jamie, who was a few years older and lived in Hialeah. After chatting for a few hours, we agreed to become pen pals. Throughout my time in high school, she sent beautifully long handwritten letters about what was happening in her life. And I responded with my own stories.

Those letters became a big part of my adolescent education. I learned how growing up in Florida contrasted with New York City, gained a different perspective on the drama of impending adulthood, and received plenty of tips on handling thorny teenage situations.

I still read and reflect on those letters, which have now yellowed with age. And as I’ve aged, I realized how precious having a pen pal is. It’s a one-to-one relationship; a way to connect with someone on an individual basis and get to know someone better letter by letter.

I often think about how the hobby of having a pen pal has declined in popularity with the advent of social media, email, and other forms of instant communication with multiple people simultaneously. And I wonder: What have we lost in the transition?

The nearly lost art of writing letters

People have been writing letters to each other – including strangers – for as long as there has been paper and ink. Writers had to take the time to form their thoughts, find the perfect words, and construct coherent sentences and paragraphs. Once letters were mailed, responses took weeks, making receiving them a pleasant surprise.

Though exchanging letters has been around forever, pen-pal services didn’t start until the 1930s, when the Student Letter Exchange connected students in different countries and encouraged them to write to each other to broaden their knowledge of various cultures.

There were other ways to make pen pals, including responding to ads in newspapers and magazines in which people posted their addresses (no one would ever do this today) and short profiles of themselves. (Sounds like the original “swipe left.”) Others were like me and Jamie, who took a brief in-person meeting and continued “talking” over the mail.

Today, we can dash off our thoughts at the speed of light. The ease of communication gives the impression that there’s no need to spend time on thinking through ideas. Can’t figure out what to say? Just send an emoji or GIF – every expression is at your fingertips. And if you do send a message, so much of it is an alphabet soup of acronyms – LMK what you think about text abbreviations. As for writing to strangers? Isn’t that what social media is for?

Combatting loneliness with pen pals

While it’s easier to make connections online than through traditional letter writing, digital relationships tend to be superficial. As I mentioned earlier, social media, instant messaging, and email can reduce the time we spend thinking about what we want to say.

The fact that we’re experiencing an epidemic of loneliness is evidence of our fraying social connections despite the promises of technology. As I wrote last week, more of us than ever before report having few or just a handful of friends who, research has shown, are critical to a happy and fulfilling life.

Don’t get me wrong: There is a role for social media, email, websites, and apps in building and strengthening relationships. But they shouldn’t be our only tools. Fortunately, pen-pal services haven’t been entirely relegated to the dustbin of history.

Organizations still exist to help you find pen pals (the Student Letter Exchange is still going after 88 years), many of which combine elements of old and new technology. PenPal.me, for example, will help you find and communicate with a pen pal online while keeping your actual address private. The service prints and mails your messages on a postcard or in a letter.

Other services bypass traditional mail entirely by delivering your messages over email. One app, Slowly, takes the digital route but doesn’t deliver instantaneously. Instead, it holds onto the message for however long it would take to deliver a letter from your address to your pen pal by traditional mail carriers.

As I think back on my pen-pal relationship with Jamie, I can’t help but think that letter writing could be a tool in our arsenal for combatting loneliness.

If you want to make new friends (and who doesn’t?), consider looking back at how we’ve done it in the past.

All the best,

Jim