Find a good old-fashioned pen-pal

When I was around 20 I started corresponding with people from all over the world, over the years (I’m 38 now) I lost contact with most, but I still keep 2 friends, that I’ve met in person in the meanwhile, cementing our friendship.
Now I decided I wanted to do it again. I work with the Internet, and I’m fed up of using email all the time. I really want to be able to curl up on the sofa, and just write long letters that will travel miles, and find someone on the other side of the world with similar ideas (or not), dreams, and projects!

Some comments from my previous post kindly took care of this goal. Here’s to long, paper-based friendships.

One good old-fashioned pen-pal.

Someone who has the time and the willingness to share some of their life with me. Someone open-hearted who likes to connect.

An interest in literature of any kind would be a bonus.

little goal, I don’t think you’re going to make the cut. I’m not even all that great about keeping in contact with people I already know—so I can imagine how well I’d do with a stranger. : (

Years ago during a time when my husband was on TDY with the Guard and I was in an unfamiliar town at slightly loose ends, I picked up a magazine that had a pen-pal column and wrote a letter.

At the time, I thought I’d get a big map for the wall and put green sticky-dots on each place from which a letter came, and use that to help my two very young sons learn a little geography.

It was three years before the first letters came, eight in one week, then in one day…I decided on receiving the first that I’d write back by hand and that I’d exchange at least three letters before making any judgements. I hung the map. I found my sticky-dots.

I received over 150 first responses to the letter I sent to that magazine (a slightly cheesy publication called something like Country Decorating and Crafts). I wrote hundreds of letters. Thousands.

I kept writing for years. I let the other women be the ones to quit. I got my last first-response letter over six years later (someone had found the magazine at her mother’s and just took a chance that I was still around and still living in the same house).

I still write to a handful of the women who have stuck with me. My little boys are 17 and 14 now. It’s been over a decade.

There are people who still write letters.