Discovering the Art of the Long Email
On friendship, attention, and why the best conversations don’t live on a device in your pocket.
A Friday night call with a close friend—our first phone conversation in over four months—reminded me how easily we can pick up where we left off, no matter the time or distance. Right off the bat, we were deep in conversation, covering everything from family and work to personal revelations. It felt like we hadn’t missed a beat.
We’ve known each other nearly 30 years, from high school to college roommates to now: two fortysomethings with families, living on different continents. A lot has happened since our last talk. And yet, the ease of our reconnection wasn’t just about shared history. I credit something else, too: the long, thoughtful emails we’ve exchanged since I gave up my smartphone for a flip phone. We’ve replaced text messages with meaningful, from-the-heart emails.
Of course, the internet has a name for this—slow communication—even if it hardly needs one. And yet, it’s so appropo, given that the way we communicate in the world today is often filled with a low-effort, high-frequency buzz of WhatsApp, text messages, DMs and social media comments. Slow communication—whether through letter writing, long emails or, perhaps, even voice notes—can be one of the most deliberate, meaningful ways of communicating with people when done with intention. I’ve certainly found that to be the case for myself.
I’ve had similar exchanges every few months with another dad friend back in Brooklyn, where we update one another on career, family and midlife musings. And then there’s another longtime friend who reconnected with me in earnest after nearly a decade of us both having lost touch. Even though we’re nine hours apart (he’s in the Bay Area) and we’ve each had children that the other hasn’t met, we’ve reconnected quickly over deep, vulnerable long email exchanges about everything: our parents, our parenting philosophies, our views on career and on America and, in many ways, what it means to live in integrity in today’s world. Our long email communications have been one of the highlights of my year.
If I was to pinpoint the key ingredient to what makes the long email so satisfying, it would be attention. And attention, as my wife pointed out to me the other night, is a key ingredient of love in one of our favorite books, “The Road Less Traveled,” by Scott M. Peck.
The principal form that the work of love takes is attention. When we love another we give him or her our attention; we attend to that person’s growth. When we love ourselves we attend to our own growth. When we attend to someone we are caring for that person. The act of attending requires that we make the effort to set aside our existing preoccupations….and actively shift our consciousness. Attention is an act of will, of work against the inertia of our own minds….
By far the most common and important way in which we can exercise our attention is by listening.
Whenever I receive a thoughtful long email from one of my friends, days and often weeks go by before I respond. I often reread their emails. This, to me, is a form of listening. I don’t have an expectation that I can just pick up the phone and call a friend on a whim these days. Everyone has their own work, family and personal commitments. So I treat the long email as I would a long conversation. I think long and hard not only about how to respond to what they’re sharing with me, but of what’s going on inside of me at that moment—what’s driving my own thoughts, feelings and actions. When I respond, I try to go beyond surface level.
The feeling of fulfillment from these long emails has left me wondering why I had never adopted slow communication earlier in my life—or why, to my recollection, no one ever engaged me in letter or card writing when I was younger.
It wasn’t until I met my wife that I began to truly contemplate life and express myself through the written word, which sounds crazy because we are both writers. But we each became writers for two very different reasons. I pursued writing to bring me closer to my passion for sports, which I turned into an early career as a journalist. When we were dating and I was being paid to write professionally, she would engage me in long emails, as we would go back and forth about work, music, life, our thoughts, feelings and dreams—and, mind you, we were living and working together, with no shortage of face-to-face time. But our long email exchanges tapped into another layer of connection. Not coincidentally, it wasn’t until after I was married that I tried my hand at essay writing, and I have my wife’s encouragement to thank for that.
My wife, on the other hand, still has boxes of handwritten letters between her and her older cousin and her late grandmother that dates back to as long as she’s known how to write. Those letters reveal countless stories, not only about her relationships with family members over the years, but also stories of herself as she came of age. She is both as good and as deep of a writer as I’ve ever known, and she credits those early years of letter writing, both to her family and in her journal, for shaping how she writes today and the ease with which she can self-reflect.
It reminds me of the quote, attributed to Leslie Lamport, “If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.”
Longform communication has never been a lost art for my wife, and it’s something she’s passed on to our kids, who spent a period of our world travels writing postcards and emails to family and friends.
Thinking about the evolution of communication, and the attention economy of today, has left me grateful to have stumbled into the art of the long email. It was never really my intention when I switched to a flip phone, but it’s been a blessing.
From campfire stories to cave paintings and writing letters, from the printing press to the telephone, radio and television, then to emails, texting, instant messaging, social media, voice notes, video chats and emoji-based reactions, our means of communication have only become more bite-sized, short-form and visually symbolic over the decades. Less revealing and personal, and more reactive, transactional, flippant and hot-take-ish. And consider this: even today’s in-person gatherings aren’t what they used to be, given how distracting and interruptive the mere presence of a smartphone can be. It takes a committed, mindful group of people to get together in-person and practice discipline in staying in the moment, instead of getting pulled away by the sight of a smartphone or the ping of a notification.
I’m not saying real communication can’t be short. Remember the days of pager code? Receiving “143” spoke volumes in just three characters (“I love you”). Nor am I saying all longform communication is intimate (I know people who can write pages and still manage to say nothing at all). But I am learning that I must pay more attention to these exchanges because we pay attention to the people we love.
If at the end of my life I am presented with a list, in descending order, of where my attention was spent, I hope to God I will be proud of what’s at the top.
I’ll be sharing more stories every Sunday — the highs, the screw-ups, the awkward new routines — as I adjust to life with a flip phone. If you’re wondering what it’s like to live slower, simpler, and maybe even saner, stick around.
thank you for sharing your musings, Chris! I am playing around with slower connection and trying to see what works/ sticks/ helps