Without sharing your words, can even the hottest relationship stop coldstop cold?
I didn’t really write that. I rewrote a line from the foremost sex and love expert Carrie Bradshaw. Swapping out a word (“words” for “worlds”) didn’t really make it my own message but when it comes to love, why find your own words when someone else has expressed your feelings better? That one’s mine.
This week, waiting for me in my inbox was an email that showed me just how far we’ve gone down the path of not using our own words. I received a Valentine’s Day pitch from a site that, like the love child of Theodore and Samantha from Her, uses AI to write love letters.
Valentinesday.ai wants to know who you love and why you love them to start. I put in the description of the man who has launched a thousand rom-coms, Fitzwilliam Darcy. (That’s Mr. Darcy to you.)
For “his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien,” the AI shot back a card that reads:
Baby, you are the best boyfriend ever: a noble person who is tall and handsome. I am in love with every inch of you and you are my best friend. You make me feel so alive, so eager to see what’s going to come next. I love your smile, your kisses, the way you touch me like we’ve never touched before. Let’s stay this way forever, baby.
While they’re not the words Elizabeth Bennet would choose, they would not be entirely off in a Hallmark card.
Given that my thoughts this holiday weekend have run to To All the Boys: Always and Forever coming out this weekend, I tried to see what Lara Jean might write in yet another letter to Peter Kavinsky. I used her words for him, “He has the look of a Handsome Boy from a different time. He could be a dashing World War I soldier, handsome enough for a girl to wait years for him to come back from war, so handsome she could wait forever.”).
Valentinesday.ai came up with:
I don’t know if you can tell but I look at you and I still get butterflies. I love you more than chocolate and if someone said they would take your love from me, I’d go hunt them down. You make me smile when no one else can and you never fail to make me laugh. I would do anything for you and no one could ever take my place in your life.
It reminded me of this strange machine I would visit in a declining retail strip in the days of dot matrix. Inside an arcade-style cabinet you could customize a black-and-white card by plugging in a few of your own words. While my mom shopped, I would play around with it, writing and discarding designs wrapped in pixelated hearts. It seemed like a strange future was before me, one in which the unfathomability of love would meet the weirdness of technology.
Now here we are, in a truly baffling timeline that has just come up against Valentine’s Day. We type so much all day long that, in many ways, we have lost the capacity to actually write. Particularly when it comes to love. We have reverted to pictograms, the smiling emoji with horns a questionably evolved descendant of a bull on a cave wall in Lascaux.
This Sunday putting pen to paper is more significant than ever. So many who are in love or lust or just like will be either separated—or have been spending too much time together to get the mental distance they need to appreciate each other. This past year, everything has slowed down except our racing thoughts. So while it’s much easier to present a card-less present or send a meme than to find the words for what you mean, this is perhaps the ideal time to sort out your true feelings on a quarantined walk. Then, return home to put them down by hand.
