Abstract
Michelle Janning finds scholarly inspiration in a shoebox.
Two years ago, in a rare spare moment of household organization spurred by procrastination, I stumbled upon a box of letters I had saved from 1990-1994, my college years. For several hours, I read through the pile of intricately folded spiral notebook paper letters—the communication form most used by me and my friends and boyfriends when we left our rural Minnesota town for our respective academic pursuits. These letters kept us together across time and geography. They made it seem as if no time had passed when we reunited. My high school friends and I wrote during class when our professors thought we were taking notes. My college boyfriends and I wrote during breaks, when our distance seemed more painful than a deep paper cut.
Sitting in this pile of paper, I started to wonder whether where I stored this memento box mattered in how much it meant to me. After all, I had forgotten about it. The letters were not only folded, they were in a bag in a box in a closet in a dark corner of our basement storage room.
My husband, the boyfriend who emerged in graduate school (he’s a sociologist, too), noticed me sitting in the letter pile in our living room. He looked at me funny—maybe because some of the letters were from past boyfriends or maybe because he figured he’d be vacuuming all of the paper shreds after my little nostalgia party was done. Then he paused and noted that he had a much smaller pile of saved letters, but had no idea where it was. He also said that when we entered college there was no widespread Internet or e-mail use; by the time we left, we were all using e-mail. Surely, he claimed, we must represent the last generation of paper letter writers.
A few weeks later, I had two lunches with two different female friends from two different generations. Our conversations tended toward a discussion of love letters. My older friend reminisced about her box of saved love letters from her husband. My younger friend talked about an e-mail folder she had created on her phone: “Messages from Cute Boys.”
Inspired by these interactions, I began a new line of research. I’ve set out to see whether gender and generation affect the meaning people attach to love letters, and whether the form of a love letter—digital or paper—matters in that meaning.
In line with my short attention span and well rounded liberal arts education, this research question sent me down numerous cross-disciplinary paths: from geography to human-computer interaction studies; from the psychology of nostalgia to British material culture studies; from consumer studies to gender and communication studies. As a sociologist, I had published on married co-workers’ work-family boundary permeability as shown through briefcases and home offices, young adults’ assessment of their bedrooms and parent relations post-divorce, and gender and the preservation of digital family photos. The sociology of love letters fit nicely as the next step in my sociological inquiry of objects and spaces.
I conducted an online survey that asked people about one love letter from a past romantic relationship. I thought that, rather than just asking whether this letter is meaningful, I’d inquire about its form, its storage location, and how often it was revisited. Because our values and memories and definitions of self may be represented by what we have and how we interact with it, I was really trying to learn about the rituals associated with the love letter’s possession and curation. Because the storage location of a memento and its likelihood to be revisited say something about its meaning, I also included interesting notions of what some consumer studies scholars call “heated” and “cooled” locations. Heated locations are accessible and central to activities in the home. Cooled locations are harder to reach. All of these concepts joined together in my survey to creatively measure how social actors singularize objects—give them personal meaning.
Some interesting findings are already emerging. First, people tend to save paper letters more than digital ones, regardless of gender and generation. Second, women save more relationship mementos, including love letters, than men. And third, men look at the letters they’ve saved more often than women, and they are more likely to store them in places that are “heated.”
These findings could suggest that men are more sentimental than women, or perhaps that men are conforming to masculine ideals of displaying “trophies” of their ability to secure romantic relationships. Or the findings could suggest that women are more likely to spend time organizing and storing objects that symbolize relationships. This is what I’m wrestling with as I finish the manuscript. Maybe if I clean another closet or re-organize my e-mail folders, I’ll stumble upon the correct interpretation.