(While it’s tempting to use Heloise and Abelard as a model, each couple invents its own vocabulary of desire. Napoleon, for example, presumed upon some private understanding when his courier presented a hastily written love note to Josephine saying that he would return to the capital in two weeks, and imploring her, “Don’t bathe.”)

Even while lacking both Abelard’s intellect and Napoleon’s tastes, it’s possible to immortalize one’s passion in the epistolary form. But to inscribe your love upon the human heart, you must attend carefully to every detail of the letter with which you convey your affection.

Stationery

The back of a cocktail napkin may have been sufficient, on occasion, to arouse the interest of the unescorted drinker beside you at the bar with a scrawled vulgarity followed by a question mark. But for a love letter, don’t depend upon paper that’s provided to sop up spilled beer. Get yourself instead to a stationer, where you should select a sheet of hand-pressed, deckle-edged 100 percent cotton paper.

The grain of such stationery, designed like your note to be neither glossy nor slick, hints at your character and may (if Freud wasn’t totally wrong) also subliminally suggest to your beloved those other cotton sheets you hope to share. In fact, all the characteristics of such fine paper commend it as the medium of a love letter: its textured face gives purchase to the trembling fingers that will unfold your letter for the first time; later, the slight shadows cast by the raised grain will conceal tear stains after your fickle heart has cooled (as well as disguise the creases when it’s crumpled into a ball to be hurled at your indifference); and finally, the heft of the sheet will withstand the decades of surreptitious rereading, your lover long since having settled for marriage to another, less literate, person.

Warning: Do not succumb to the temptation to employ your own personal stationery imprinted with your name and address. Such handsome lettering makes identification of the author appallingly easy for your lover’s attorney. (Imagine, if you are not quite convinced of the danger, the disapproving nod as each juror examines your name and address engraved above your pledges of undying love—and support.)

Remember, too, that if your beloved actually needs your name and address on such an intimate declaration to distinguish your note from the others he or she regularly receives, perhaps your relationship hasn’t yet matured sufficiently for your emotions to be immortalized in ink.

Ink

Henry Ford’s position on the color of the Model T should guide your choice. You can write a love letter in any color you like, so long as it is black.

No, you may not use blue, unless your imagination tends to the pornographic. As William Gass reminds us in his book-length meditation On Being Blue, the color serves as a synonym for the lewd (e.g., a “blue” movie). So if you’re intent upon scorching your lover with salacious prose, you may suggest a certain droll wit by penning your indecencies in blue.