Knowing What to Say
Tell your partner what your relationship means to you. What does your partner bring to your life? What was missing from your life before you met your partner? What sticks in your mind when your partner is absent? One of the nicest things that you can do in any sort of correspondence is to write from the heart and include specific and detailed answers to these questions. Let your partner know how their love has changed your life for better. If you're having trouble getting started, this can be a great way to get something out of the way and explain why you're writing, and what you want to say: "I've needed to say this for far too long and I couldn't wait any longer to let you know exactly how I feel about you."
Reminisce. Love emails are a great chance to reminisce about a good date you recently had together, or another shared experience. Whether you're writing to a lover who's far away, or someone who's in the same town, it's a great way to express your feelings, especially feelings you may have kept hidden during the moment. An e-mail can be a great opportunity to explain how you're feeling after a first date, or after a couple dates, if you're the shy type. Talk about what you enjoyed about the date, and what you admire in the person. It can be about a very simple moment that really touched your heart, but you never told them about it. It doesn't have to be serious and it's best to keep it focused on something light. Instead of recounting how your heart fluttered so when you kissed your lover on the boardwalk at midnight, reminisce about how it rained on both of you just after, or how your dinner was a disaster, or how ridiculous your cab driver was.
Make short-term plans together. Whether you're writing to someone you're with already, or you're writing to someone you hope to get with, your goal is to move things forward and present yourself as an interesting, engaging person worth spending a bit more time with. How to do this? Give the person something to look forward to. Intro the letter with general details, a description of your day, or a funny story about your cat, then move into an idea about a thing you could do together in the future. Shoot someone a link to a play you want to check out, or the Yelp page of a restaurant that looks good. It's an e-mail. Use the Internet to your advantage. E-mails aren't always the best venue for deep thoughts and serious expressions of feelings. Save that for real conversations, and keep your lovey e-mails as practical as possible, sprinkled with real heart and charm.
Respond to previous correspondence. If your partner has asked you a bunch of questions in your last correspondence, don't ignore those questions and launch into a long tone poem about how much you miss them. Address the questions you were asked, which will give you a good way to get started.
Praise something. In longer or established relationships, you may want your love e-mail to get a little more serious, because you're writing for a special occasion or want to express something deeper. Write about qualities that make your partner special for you. Choose their particular trait that you want to praise. Consider the following questions for good options: What is your partner's greatest strength? What do you see in them that they may not see? What is your best memory together? How has your relationship changed you for the better? What made you fall in love?
Keep it light. There isn't anything worse than a love letter that's depressing or desperate. Even if you're far away from your partner, and you miss them terribly, nobody wants to read about how you're trumping around the house, and can't eat or go out because of your unending devotion. Pull it together and give your partner reasons to want to see you, not reasons to stay away. Your partner wants to know that their lover is living a real life and accomplishing goals and standing strong for them. How can they know you're reliable if you are always down about their absence?
Give your partner something to respond to. Showing a genuine interest in your partner's life and trying to learn more about them is one of the best ways to come up with content for your loving e-mail. Show curiosity. Write as if you can't wait to get a response. As long as your questions are sincere, light, and avoid awkward probing or jealous suspicion, asking questions is a great way and reason to write an e-mail. Good questions: What have you been up to? How was your weekend at the lake? I've been thinking lots about you since that night at the lake. Have you? Bad questions: Where were you last night? Who were hanging out with? Why didn't you call me? Are you going to call me? I love you, do you love me?
Write even if you don't have anything particular to say. In long distance relationships, you'll often find that e-mailing is one of the more convenient and regular ways of corresponding, especially if you're both busy and don't have the time or energy to Skype or phone chat for 2 hours a night. Eventually, you may feel like you're running out of steam, but just taking some time to write, even if it seems mundane, will let your partner know that you care. Tell a goofy story about your pet, or something that happened at work. Write about yourself, and ask questions to your partner. The mundane can still be romantic if it comes from a place of sincerity. Share your life with someone. Easiest, best, and most effective thing to put into a love email: "I can't stop thinking about you."
Styling Love E-Mails
Make yourself impossible to forget. The purpose of a love letter is to elicit feelings of love from the person who is reading it. To woo. Telling someone you love them over and over and over won't do that. Charming them to pieces by making your life sound interesting, lovable, and unforgettable? That's more like it.
Use vivid details to turn on the charm. Say you need to write your partner an e-mail, but all you've done today was goon-out on the TV and eat ramen. That may seem like the makings of a pretty boring love e-mail, but good writers can inject anything with a little life, a little charm, and enough vivid details to make it seem downright charming: "Today my roommate has been conducting experiments in the kitchen, taking prefabricated blocks of noodle stuffs and boiling them in a mixture of salt and tap water. The results are staggering, possibly bioterrorism, and he claims delicious. My senses tell me that you're entirely too classy to come to my house and experience this ramen disaster, so I propose a date to the movies, to solve both our problems."
Don't get mushy. Before you hit "send," it's a good idea to count up the number of "I love yous" in the email. If you're running into double-digits, cut most of them. You don't want your "I love you" to turn into a cheapened meaningless phrase, and e-mails are unfortunately an easy way to make that happen. Good rule of thumb: If you accidentally sent this e-email to your best friend instead of your lover, how embarrassing would it be? If the answer is "extremely," make it a little less cheesy.
Keep it PG-13 on your end. Words can be sexy, but it's usually best to let your wit and your charm do the wooing, not your graphic descriptions of anatomy. In general, you don't want love letters or e-mails to turn into more pornographic territory. Save it for the meet-up. If the emailing takes a turn into more adult territory, it shouldn't be right away, and it shouldn't be one-sided. Let it build slowly, and let your partner make the first move, then follow suit. If you want to exchange racier e-mails, try starting extremely slowly, using innuendo and seeing if your partner picks up on the sexual tension. If not, drop it. Don't start writing about how you couldn't get the firm, supple cantaloupes at the store out of your mind all day, or you'll come off like a weirdo.
Revise your e-mail as you would for a school paper. If you want to woo with your words, make sure you didn't include any unfortunate typos. Let your e-mail sit for a while, then return to it an hour later and read over it closely with fresh eyes. Work through it and make it sound good. You want to get your words down right.
E-Mailing Basics
Include a familiar salutation and a closing. Just because you're writing e-mail doesn't mean it shouldn't look like a regular love letter. Include a basic salutation, addressing the letter to your lover with a "Dear," and close the letter "Love" or "Yours" and your name. Other good closings might include, "Lovingly" or "Always," but it's usually the simplest that gets the job done right. Good time to use the "L" word. Stilted closings should be avoided. No "Sincerely" or "All best." You're not writing to your boss. If you use a pet name with your partner, that's totally cool. You can and should use it. If you don't use one, though, don't try to make it happen in e-mail. Awkward.
Use mostly proper capitalization, spelling, and grammar. A love message that looks like textspeak will be hard to take seriously. Not all relationships are the same, but if it's important for you to write your loving feelings to someone, it can't hurt to do it in semi-formal language, using proper capitalization, spelling, and basic grammar rules. Of course, there's no e-mail gestapo, and there's no one way to write to your lover. If you both favor the well-placed emoji to the well-drawn metaphor, go for it. Write "luv u bae." Still, try to make your e-mails easy to read, and spell out words whenever possible. Pay especially close attention to "your" and "you're." Mixing those up is a turn-off for some people.
Use a creative title. Getting an email titled "Hey" or "I Love You" is like getting a gift without any packaging. It might seem like a little thing, and it's true that the content is more important, but learning to properly title your e-mails, especially your charming, witty, lovey-dovey ones, will make them that much better. Good tactic: If you can't think of anything good, scan through the email and look for a funny bit of language that you can use to slap in the title window. It'll seem charming, and funny when your partner gets to that patch of the letter.
Send no more than one longish email per day. One well-written, engaging, heartfelt, witty, charming email to a lover is a wonderful thing to receive. It can be a gift. But 15 increasingly desperate two-sentence emails with nothing but emojis and the sentence "Where r u??!" won't be. Try to restrain yourself, even if you're feeling the big feelings. It's always better to compose one good email and put the ball into the other court, then leave them wanting more. What's longish? It depends, but a good rule of thumb is to copy-paste your text into a word document and do a word count. If it's longer than the last history paper you wrote, and you're getting a short paragraph in reply, maybe start cutting them down a bit.
Don't respond right away. You don't want to give the impression that you're sitting and staring at your gmail window waiting for a response. Even if it's a coincidence that you saw the e-mail pop into your inbox, play it cool. Wait at least a couple hours to respond and try to think of good responses and good content in the meantime. It's better to be good than fast anyway. After you write a draft, it's a good idea to let it sit for a while to, go do something else, and go back to it to read it with fresh eyes. Still feel the same way about those powerful emotions you dumped into the e-mail? See any typos? Always a good idea to let it sit before you dash it off.
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