It may seem old-fashioned but, finds Magin McKenna, writing love

THEY said writing was dead. What use a pencil for a generation that meets, greets and falls in love to a soundtrack of booming club music, heaving pubs and the infamous double-beep of a new text? Except there's one problem with that life, one that's saving the written word. And it's this: when the daily grind threatens to drown them out, how can couples keep connected amid a swell of background noise?

The answer might sound like something consigned to history's dustbin, but modern love letters are proving a successful solution to the relatively new problem of how to keep your love in bloom when the world won't stop breathing down your neck.

A discoloured Love Heart sweet sits wilting on the mantelpiece in the Glasgow home of Stephen Toft, 35, and Kirsten Leggat, 30. It reads, simply, "I love you" and the couple has kept it since May when Toft pulled it from a packet of Love Hearts and presented it to Leggat.

While most couples would have either eaten the sweet or tossed it in the bin by now, Leggat and Toft kept it to remind them of how the written word weaves together the fabric of their relationship. Since the pair met last April at a pub in Stewarton, Ayrshire, they have been writing love letters to "stay connected" and, more importantly, keep from committing the cardinal sin of coupledom - taking each other for granted.

The love letter isn't dead, the pair maintain. Rather, it has evolved to fit the needs of our technology-driven society. Although they occasionally exchange full-fledged love letters, Toft and Leggat have found that even the smallest bits of communication - such as romantic text messages - make a big impact on their relationship.

"When you write something down, you're showing your full feeling," explains Toft, a police diver. "It's easy to say 'I love you' but it's more difficult to write it on a piece of paper and give it to a person. Writing is permanent. It doesn't go away."

Before Toft proposed, during a holiday in Venice last autumn, he summed up his feelings on a blank card which Leggat, a nurse, now carries with her in her handbag at all times. "It makes me feel nice to read it," she says, "Especially if I'm having a bad day."

Although new couples, such as Leggat and Toft, have found writing love letters helpful in their burgeoning relationships, the practice can benefit couples that have been together longer. According to Sue Maxwell, a sexual relationship therapist at Couples Counselling Scotland, writing their feelings down is sometimes the only way a couple can rediscover that lost spark.

"Most couples have dual income and almost no sex," says Maxwell. "It seems people are so stressed in their relationships, jobs or childcare that everything else takes over and the couple loses its emphasis on retaining coupleness.

"If they write to each other, the writing itself might not simply be a note, but much more than that. It can be an important way to learn how to grow and move in the relationship."

In other words, writing a romantic note can provide the impetus a couple needs to get out of a rut. Across the Atlantic, singles are also finding a welcome salvation to dating through Quiet Party, America's fastest growing singles romp, where noise is verboten. With silence on their lips and rediscovered pencils at their fingertips, hundreds of New York's quiet partying singletons have found a new way to connect, primary-school style.

Partygoers feverishly fling flirty notes at whoever will catch and write back. If all goes well, someone gets lucky, or at least gets a spring in their step before lobbing a ball of paper at the next person. Confidence at quiet parties is the number one must-bring, for notes run the gamut from the marginally risque to the downright scandalous. And with most partygoers having text-honed skills in the art of the short and direct flirt, the paper starts to steam.

Here are a couple of the more printable examples: "Do you write here often?" and "Forget the paper. Write on my body."

To Quiet Party creators Paul Rebhan and Tony Noe, these unconventional parties offer singles a welcome solution to the social headache of trying to sustain any sort of conversation in the midst of overpowering background noise.

Participants pay a minimal fee to enter, then receive envelopes, paper and pencils and are allowed only to "whisper" in areas designated for low-volume conversations. After a few minutes of booze, whispers and giggles, the bits of paper start flying. "Once people start drinking," says Rebhan, "everything goes crazy."

The parties originated when Rebhan and Noe tried to strike up a conversation in a Manhattan bar and found themselves screaming at each other in order to be heard above the cacophony of chatter, mobile phones and a cranked-up stereo system.

It seems the city that never sleeps can't shut up either and as a result, Quiet Party was born, licensed and trademarked by the pair of artists. (Rebhan achieved a certain lowbrow New York City fame after sneaking one of his paintings into the Metropolitan Museum of Art.) Lauded in the American press as a "cultural phenomenon" and a "singles scene unlike any other", the parties have proved contagious, springing up in the most unlikely of places outside of NYC. Over the past few months, they have become the hippest happenings in Beijing.

According to Rebhan, women who attend the events overwhelmingly prefer men who are not only attractive and single, but also skilled in the arts of grammar, punctuation and spelling. "They tell me they like Quiet Party because they can see how literate a man is," he says. "In a bar they see a good looking guy and are only focused on the visual aspects. They don't realise until later that maybe they are incompatible. You can tell a lot more about a person by the way he or she writes."

But for long-term couples, minor details, such as a misplaced comma or mis-spelled word, do little to dampen the affections. For Stewarton pair Paul and Lynette Dowden, who last year gave birth to twin boys, short love notes - no matter how they are written - are welcome respites. They often use text messages to say "I love you".

"When you're knee-deep in family life, sometimes you don't express things you want to because you're saying, 'Make up the bottle,' or, 'Take the bin out.' Taking the time to send a text, you get to say all the things you want to say," says Paul, 41. "It helps us appreciate the moments," agrees Lynette, 31. "I've taken to saving certain ones. 'I love Paul' is the greeting message on my phone."

Copyright 2003 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
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