There were quite a few advantages to having a pen pal, especially compared to the friendships today that are all texting and no substance.
Give them something to work with
These days, you can send someone ‘hey’ via a text message, and that’s usually enough to make them carry the conversation. That wasn’t much of an option with a letter, however. No, you had to find some paper, write everything down, and then pay for postage, so you might as well say something.
You learned that you had to give the other person something to work with, rather than just a basic phrase. It could be little stories they’d be interested in or gossip, maybe even some family news. Whatever it was, letter-writing taught people to give the person something of substance.
Silence wasn’t an emergency
Maybe your pen pal took over three days to reply to your message. That was fine back then. Yes, having a pen pal meant learning that you didn’t need to expect instant or even fast replies from a friend. It could take a little longer, and really, that was fine.
But phones changed that rather dramatically. Now, we all expect to have more contact, and a lot more frequently, too. We assume that our friends are going to be constantly reachable. We don’t really think about how they have their own lives and things to do.
The whole story came at once
You can send half a thought via text message, and then fix it six messages later. It’s not really that important to make reasonable sense anymore because you know you can quickly explain yourself shortly after. But it wasn’t that way with writing a letter to a pen pal.
No, you had to make sure you made some kind of sense. You sent the recipient the beginning, middle, correction, joke, and final thought together, meaning that you had to be a lot more careful with the things you said. Everything you wrote had to be deliberate. You had no room to immediately clear up misunderstandings.
A disagreement had breathing room
Friends get annoyed with each other sometimes, and pen pals did the same, too. That hasn’t changed. What has changed, though, is the fact that you can send an angry reply immediately after getting an irritating message, without any time to cool off.
Pen pals couldn’t do that. They’d have to write, address, and mail any kind of irritation to their pen pal. All of that took time. Pen pals understood that they didn’t need to communicate their annoyance immediately, and that it was a lot better to cool off before sending a reply.
The wait was part of it
Anticipation is an important part of friendships, and pen pals really understood that fact. It’s not like they could refresh the mailbox twelve times an hour, after all. They just had to wait for the mail carrier to bring a reply, no matter how long that took.
But modern friendships don’t really learn that. Fast replies are so common that anticipation has practically gone out the window, and the excitement of waiting for a message doesn’t really exist anymore.
Fast didn’t automatically mean close
People who had pen pals understood something pretty important about friendships. They knew that closeness and immediacy were not the same thing at all. Being close with someone could involve not talking to them for weeks, or even months, at a time, and that was okay.
Yet so many people today confuse closeness with immediacy. They assume that someone who takes 5 minutes to reply is a closer friend than someone who takes 5 days, even though that’s utterly ridiculous.
The parts you don’t see
It was perfectly normal back then for your friend to have parts of their life you didn’t know about. You didn’t need live coverage of their every waking minute. No, it was fine for them to do things that remained completely private.
Maybe they’d mention them to you later, or maybe they wouldn’t mention them whatsoever. It was their choice, and this kind of privacy doesn’t really exist anymore. Communication is so much easier, meaning that many people expect to get narration about someone’s entire life.
Missing somebody wasn’t a problem to fix
Gaps between conversations gave you the chance to do something pretty rare. You could actually miss the other person. It wasn’t something that you needed to fix, but rather, it was a normal part of how relationships used to work.
A friend could disappear into their own life for a week or two, and then come back with a letter that detailed the things that had happened since. Phones have practically removed any kind of distance. These days, missing someone feels like it’s an issue you’re meant to solve immediately.
The benefit of the doubt
You didn’t immediately assume something was wrong when a pen pal took ages to answer. You assumed there was a good reason for it, such as them being busy or the letter being delayed. Perhaps they just didn’t want to write yet. That was okay.
Having a pen pal taught you to give the other person the benefit of the doubt, instead of immediately presuming that something was wrong. It’s not like that anymore. Texting has given us timestamps, read receipts, and online status that remove any benefit of the doubt.
Friendship sometimes required trouble
There’s no denying that texting has made communication more convenient. But that might not always be a good thing. When you had a pen pal, you had to do things that were slightly annoying, like finding paper and a stamp, then writing enough to make the postage worthwhile.
You also had to remember to actually mail it. None of that was extremely difficult, of course, but it did make people understand that inconvenience was sometimes a part of friendship. Texting has removed all that friction, and we assume that everything about a friendship has to be convenient.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
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