ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how love letters tell a story about age, time, memory, and nostalgia—factors that also affect cultural constructions of what is perceived as a good relationship, good love affair, or good family. Time is socially constructed, which means that, rather than looking at a year or a decade in absolute terms, social researchers point out how people decide whether and how time matters in their individual and collective stories. In the significance of time discussion, it was apparent that the compression of time between exchanges caused by digitization of communication was evidence to some that the letter is dying. The chapter examines the connection between era and type of saved communication most often looked at see how closely aligned the type of communication was with the available technology at the time. Frequencies of communication format used during relationships reveal interesting age group similarities and differences, some that resemble findings for early relationship stages, and some that do not.
