My Response to WaPo’s ‘Blueberry’ Love Letter Recommendation for Valentine’s Day
Valentine’s Day is approaching, and I’m reading countless articles in various magazines with advice on writing love letters. Sometimes I think that we journalists were all born together at the end of the 19th century and cryogenically frozen by the evil editor Walter Burns in a secret corner of the Chicago Examiner’s newsroom, and they’re slowly thawing us out according to job demand. However, okay, let’s admit that girls today can still read letters, and let’s admit — a little science fiction is important in any column — that guys today can still write. Where do we begin?
As a disclaimer, my first piece of advice on how to write love letters is: don’t write love letters. And the second: tear it up; you still have time. I even have a third: are you really going to go out looking for a mailbox in this cold? But I know you won’t listen to me.
So, since you still want to write a few words to the love of your life, the first thing I ask is that you avoid comparing your love to a blueberry in your letter. I just read an article by a poet in the Washington Post recommending this kind of association in love letters this year, and explaining that one of her poems stems precisely from this analogy. I haven’t read the poem because my blood sugar has been a bit high lately, but I imagine it goes something like, “My little blueberry, I love you.” Don’t do it; it’s a trap. The blueberry is small, and your love is supposed to be big. The blueberry stains, and your love should clean them up. And, well, there’s something else here, and it’s terrible, Madam Poet: BLUEBERRIES ARE SOLD IN BULK. (RELATED: You Can’t Go on Destroying Wealth Forever, You Know. Ultimately, There Are Consequences.)
Another important aspect when sending a love letter is making sure the person you’re writing to knows who you are. In many countries, by skipping this basic step of safety in love, a romantic who sends an innocent love letter can, in a few hours, become a romantic sharing a prison cell with other idiots who decided to harass strangers with inappropriate declarations of love.
As you can see, before that idiot Benito Antonio sang nonsense under the influence of severe tongue paralysis at the Super Bowl, people who claimed to sing in Spanish wrote truly inspiring lyrics.
If you’ve been rejected by someone you like, do yourself a favor and don’t send a love letter — humiliating, boring, and awkward for both of you — unless you’re going to end it with a few stanzas from their biggest hit, which was a romantic ballad titled “Kill Yourself, But Don’t Splash Me,” by a Spanish band from the ’80s. Back in my DJ days, I used to play it whenever one of my ex-girlfriends walked into the pub. Just kidding. Actually, I used to play another song for them called “You Look Quite Like Satan.” As you can see, before that idiot Benito Antonio sang nonsense under the influence of severe tongue paralysis at the Super Bowl, people who claimed to sing in Spanish wrote truly inspiring lyrics. By the way, the only thing more powerful than hate is a baby’s clenched fist when it grabs something toxic.
The author of the Post article says that the analog expression of affection goes far in the digital age, and it’s true, but my advice is that if February 14 is just hours away, don’t wait to see how far and how long the analog expression of affection will take to arrive. Urgently resort to digital means to congratulate her, unless you want your girlfriend to celebrate Valentine’s Day with her next boyfriend.
And try to do it face-to-face, even if it’s not by letter. Love is inherently intimate. Valentine’s Day has managed to ruin all of that. On Valentine’s Day, love is an omnipresent heart, in the form of an emoticon, a balloon, or a napkin in a trendy restaurant. And every time I see it, instead of thinking about falling in love, I think about arrhythmias, heart attacks, and my chest even starts to hurt. Yes, I’m the Mr. Scrooge of Valentine’s Day, and I have no intention of redeeming myself.
You should know that the public display of love existed on Valentine’s Day even before social media. People would pin their received love letters to the office corkboard and even make a pendant out of the clump of fur their boyfriend sent them — which proves that the boyfriend and the cat have been swapping roles throughout the centuries. However, in the digital age, it’s easier to know which beautiful women will soon be available: when you see couples uploading photos with kisses, hearts, and promises of eternal love to their profiles this coming February 14, it will only be a matter of weeks before everything blows up. My theory is that you don’t need to show the whole world so much love for your partner if you haven’t been flirting with the new head of HR at a Coldplay concert.
Getting back to the love letters, the instructions are simple. Never ask ChatGPT to do it for you. A woman is capable of spending her entire month’s salary on a secret CIA app that detects 100 percent of AI contributions in a text. Even if you’re writing a letter, try not to use medieval dialects or promise her a castle at her feet when you return from your chivalric adventures. Use simple language, lie in moderation, avoid impregnating the paper with perfumes that attract rats on mail trucks, and forget about including sexual innuendos. One hundred percent of the time you send a sexual innuendo to your partner in writing, even if it’s a subtle joke, her father will receive the mail by mistake and decide to read it to your girlfriend over the phone to surprise her. And he’ll be the one who gets the surprise.
Finally, congratulate her. I have never met a more angry creature on earth than a woman who doesn’t receive a greeting or a gift from her boyfriend on Valentine’s Day. It’s a biological fact that women’s blood circulates at three times its normal temperature between 00:00 and 24:00 on February 14, and any excuse that might work the rest of the year will be useless if you forget to wish her a happy Valentine’s Day. This includes “I drank too much with friends,” “I fell asleep like a baby,” “I thought it was still Christmas,” and “I suffered a space-time rupture when I got out of bed today, was sucked into a parallel orbit filled with viscous, radioactive matter, and a black hole deposited me in a non-place after being abducted by those bug-eyed idiots.” I actually used that last one once on WhatsApp with a girlfriend from my 20s, and her response wouldn’t have passed even the most basic standards of international diplomacy on the eve of a war: “Your friend Pablo is hilarious. He’s so funny, he just told me a joke, and we almost fell out of bed laughing.”
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