Writing Handwritten Letters When Your Spouse is Overseas

I left for college in 1997 and email was very new. My dad hooked us up with Prodigy and then AOL when I was in high school but it wasn’t until I started college that most of my friends had email too. For the first few years, we still wrote handwritten letters to each other. 

I loved that and I miss how we use to do that all the time. I had this box filled with stationery and I loved getting it out and writing my friends letters. Updating them on my life and what was going on.

By the time, I graduated college email was more the norm, and these days we mostly use email for business reasons or transactions, or to get promotions to our favorite or not-so-favorite stores and restaurants. As much as I love how easy it is to connect with pretty much anyone these days, I miss those handwritten letters.

Ideally, each deployment would be filled with handwritten love letters between my husband and me but it just didn’t happen that way with us this last deployment. Communication was actually a big issue between us and one I hope we can work out before he has to leave again. There is something special about getting a letter in the mail written in his handwriting knowing he touched the same paper I was reading. There is something magical about it all.

I do have to be thankful, though.  Back when my Grandparents were going through WW2 all they had were handwritten notes.  No chatting on Skype for them.  No phone calls and no emails. They also didn’t even know when my Grandpa would be home. Can you imagine? What a different time we live in.

Do you write a lot of handwritten letters during deployment or do you depend more on email/Skype?  Do you write handwritten letters to friends?