Love Letters.

Should you keep your old love letters once the relationship ends ?. I was talking to someone recently about this and we came to no clear conclusion. On the one hand keeping records of a former relationship might not seem appropriate once you are in a new one, but on the other hand they are a record of an important part of your life and perhaps worthy of saving. My late wife always kept the letters I sent to her but I no longer seem to have hers, the legacy of another problem that can arise, namely the difficulty of storage. I you tend to write a lot of letters or the ones you write are voluminous in content there is the problem of storage. If you have had to downsize in terms of your accomodation, as I havefour times in the past decade, things have to be thrown away and sometimes that you have to be ruthless in terms of what you think is valuable enough to keep. From a professional historians viewpoint of course, such letters are invaluable in what they can say about the particular social organisation of a given period, but how much one would want ones most intimate thoughts and feelings trawled over by the history boys and girls might well be another matter.

Personally, I think that I would opt for keeping such items and wish now that I had. Now that we have the means to digitize letters and the like it makes saving them much easier. At least if you save them, when you get old you have something to remind you of who you once were when you still had a future before you.