Slow Motion
New York Times · LC · trust 23/100
Listen · 11:54 min Share full article Credit... María Jesús Contreras By Melissa Kirsch
Postal correspondence has a trapped-in-amber quality that an electronic exchange never can. A postcard from Sarah is a snapshot, a moment in time captured and suspended until I receive it in my mailbox. I will respond with a postcard of my own, in a kind of parallel conversation to our daily tide of text messages, one that accumulates only as much momentum as the rate of the U.S. postal system allows.
There’s a story in The Times today about a pen-pal resurgence among young adults. I read with interest of the renewed fascination with charming stationery and ornate envelopes, as well as the “collective craving for personal connections that build gradually over time.”
As an adolescent, I built a gradual friendship with a girl in Singapore I was matched with via Stickers magazine , the official publication for “kids stuck on stickers.” We probably exchanged a total of five or six letters over a couple of years, but the distance and time gave our bond a sort of gravitas. In the eternity between letters, I’d daydream about what her room looked like, who her friends were, adding another dimension to the written intimacy.
Technology offers the illusion of intimacy. The volume, the pace, the constant flow of updates — they mimic the closeness created by an actual conversation, but sometimes those very things can make a torrent of texts feel hollow. We don’t have that time between communiqués to wonder what the other person is up to, to fill in the blanks with our imaginations.
An essay in The Atlantic this week suggested that one of the problems with dating apps is that the dates they facilitate are hardly conducive to real connection. Far more effective are group activities or hangouts where people get to know one another gradually. Romance, like friendship, blooms with attention that’s slow and undemanding.
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