Love Letters

I was reading some beautiful love letters that were written by powerful and famous men written to their wives. Men like John Adams, Beethoven, Winston Churchill and Napoleon. They often expressed the sentiment that their lives would have no real value without their love. It’s quite interesting considering how much we value their accomplishments in the fields of music, politics, and military strategy. It was these accomplishments that made them famous enough that we know their names still today, but they didn’t value those as much as they valued their wives.


Most of these men spent long weeks or even long years away from their wives and the letters speak of the longing they have to be together again. They talk about how they are almost unable to bear another moment apart. My husband have had to spend periods of our lives with his job taking him away and I can attest to the fact that when your love isn’t nearby that life starts to lose its sheen. Slowly, things that you thought were important enough to bicker about when you were both under the same roof stop mattering at all. Then more and more things lose their value as your mind is consumed with the loss of the person you care most about.

I read in Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love” about a friend who wanted to counsel refugees. These were people who had been through the hardest of lives and had experienced unthinkable losses and she was very worried about being able to help them, but she found out that the only thing they really wanted to discuss was love. The “I met this man on the boat” kinds of things. Matters of the heart are what connect us and make us human.

I’m sure that someone, somewhere has tried to study love—dissect it, break it down, make some connection to brain function in order to sterilize the process and make it seem scientific instead of special. But it is special because it’s deeply personal. John Wooden, famous basketball coach, continued to write love letters to his wife of 53 years even after her death. He leaves them in piles on her gravesite and, to this day, not even his children know what they say. That’s special and no scientist is ever going to convince me it’s not.