So, LOL. But also: YAY. Because while conversation hearts, as one-to-one communication, are decidedly lacking, they are, as mass communication, weirdly revealing. Pretty much any cultural product—magazines, the wedding pages, movies, music, sitcoms, fashion—will double as a kind of anthropological artifact, and I am being only the tiniest bit facetious when I say that candy hearts are, 2 BE SURE, among those products. You can understand something about American culture by knowing that Necco, which makes the candies, now offers sugar-free versions of them. Or that the company recently introduced En Español Sweethearts. Or that, in early 2013, it began offering customized messages on its hearts. Or that it continually rejects customer requests for hearts with messages like “GET A PRE-NUP” and “CALL MY LAWYER.”

Conversation hearts once offered a message declaring, “You Are Gay." They recently retired the once-popular “Dig Me.” This year has brought, through its be-chalked pictograms, not only a kind of meta-textual communication to the world of the conversation heart; it also, notably, brings the end of messages like “OCCUPY MY HEART” (whoa, political!), “LOVE ME” (whoa, needy!), “SHINE BRIGHT” (too demanding), “TWEET” (too commercial), and “U R Hot” (self-explanatory). Still included in Necco’s cadre of coronaried communications, however, are messages that extend to us from 1902, when the candies were first made in a factory: "PUPPY LOVE," "SWEET LOVE," "LOVE ME,” "KISS ME," and, of course, the tried-and-true "BE MINE."

All of that—the ebb and flow of sentiment, romantic and otherwise—says something about what it means to be an American in 2015. And it says something about what it’s meant to be an American in previous years, as well. Arthur Miller said that a newspaper is a nation talking to itself; but—SWEET TALK, literally—you could say the same about candy hearts. Taken together, over time, stamped out in a mixture of sugar, corn syrup, and gelatin, the candies record where we’ve been, and hint at where we’re going.

Necco is the oldest candy company in the U.S. In the mid-1800s, Oliver Chase invented a machine that was able to cut candy lozenges and pulverized sugar into varying shapes—popular ones at the time were things like horseshoes and baseballs and shells. Back then, a popular competitor candy resembled today’s fortune cookies: Scallop-shaped, they contained strips of colored paper with messages written on them. In the 1860s, his brother, Daniel, devised a machine that would stamp messages onto those candies using red vegetable dye.

The brothers’ dual inventions meant that the messages could be conveyed without paper; the candies—with long messages scrolled on their exteriors—soon became popular. Particularly at weddings, where they offered such of-the-time advice as “Married in Pink, he’ll take to drink” and “Married in White, you have chosen right.” (They also offered some strange requests—like, for example, "Please send a lock of your hair by return mail.") By the early 1900s, the variety of shapes Necco had initially offered in its candies gave way to one: hearts. And as the candies grew in popularity, their messages grew shorter in length—many of them resembling the ones we know today. The denizens of the early 20th century used these tracts of sugary real estate to convey many of the same messages we do in the 21st: “BE MINE.” “MISS YOU.” “LOVE U.”