| Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
I wrote my first love letter when I was fifteen, not to my wife. Men seldom marry the girl to whom they wrote their first love letter. At that age, we often confuse lust for love. The fiery sexual longings of the pubescent physical body can be compelling and confusing. Although I have a romantic bend of mind, almost quixotic in the adulations of my teenage crushes, I was never verbally demonstrative of my feelings.
My first love letter was flowery and full of idealism. It must have sounded corny to its recipient. It was sincere, and I got the girl’s attention, except I was afraid to talk to her. In my youth, I was excruciatingly shy and self-effacing. While glib in writing, I get tongue-tied when I am with a girl. Fighting my anxiety, I would feel so awkward trying to say sensible things, and I was lost for words. I preferred writing love letters to express myself, and I could bend to my emotions in writing rather than verbalizing them. Another emotional outlet is writing poetry. I write better when I’m feeling depressed or going through difficulties. I become introspective when I feel the world is a hostile place to live and no one to turn to. A natural loner, I lick my wounds privately when hurt.
I come from a home where my mother could easily express her feelings and show her emotions, whereas my father kept most of his feelings to himself and never showed emotions, a typical macho man. I took after my father when dealing with emotions. Although I have gotten better with it through the years, I still keep my feelings to myself. Instead of talking to someone when I’m struggling emotionally, I retreat to my world of writing. It has become my therapy and creative outlet. I sorted out most of my conflicted feelings about the past by writing about my experiences. I draw my personal insights about myself from processing my experiences through writing.
“Recently, I came across research studies on the benefits of writing journals or journaling. Apparently, it is an effective means of improving emotional self-regulation and managing one’s emotional distress. By writing about our experiences, we deliberately create a personal narrative of events, the emotions evoked by them, and how they affect us.
Recently, I came across research studies on the benefits of writing journals or journaling. Apparently, it is an effective means of improving emotional self-regulation and managing one’s emotional distress. By writing about our experiences, we deliberately create a personal narrative of events, the emotions evoked by them, and how they affect us. Writing engages our brain differently than when we are verbalizing the experience. Writing makes us become more deliberate and self-reflective because it’s slower than verbalizing, thus processing the experience or digesting the events with all their emotional undertones more completely. There is more room for correcting our writing if it fails to capture what we meant. Spoken words have some finality; though we can retract them, it takes much more.
In this age of the Internet and social media, the age of immediate gratification, I still prefer the old-fashioned way of writing love letters to a woman I fancy. Maybe I should re-invent my relationship with my wife by writing her love letters again, like the good old days.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr. Fernando B. Perfas is an addiction specialist who has written several books and articles on the subject. He currently provides training and consulting services to various government and non-government drug treatment agencies regarding drug treatment and prevention approaches. He can be reached at fbperfas@gmail.com.
