Postcards: A Love Story

We keep in touch via texts and DMs and emails. But as one writer found, a good old-fashioned postcard can help us connect so much more deeply.

- Jeff Gordinier

AS SOON AS LAUREN AND I REALIZED that our long-simmering crushes on each other could lead to something serious, I faced a dilemma.

She was moving to Los Angeles a week later. I lived north of New York City, and I needed to stay put for a few years in order to be present for my two school-age children, who lived with their mother most of the time. How were Lauren and I going to make this last?

I knew enough about my own history and the predictable trajectories of long-distance relationships to realize that a romance dependent on and nurtured by technology—texts, emails, selfies, obligatory FaceTime sessions with unfortunate close-ups of my neck —would probably peter out in spasms of frustration. I needed another approach.

That’s when I started sending Lauren postcards. Hundreds of postcards, enough to fill a couple of shoeboxes, over the course of a year. (I had been a passionate postcard aficionado in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as a way of staying in touch with friends after college, but I’d let the practice lapse.) At her apartment in the Hollywood Hills, Lauren would sometimes receive four or five postcards in a single day. I concede, in retrospect, that this compulsive practice of mine ran the risk of bringing the relationship to a premature end, because it made me look a little overbearing. But postcards, as I have come to learn, have a way of disarming people. Postcards are intrinsically delightful. And they just might be the secret to deepening our connections with the people we care about.