You’ve Got Mail: How Emailing Deepened My Relationships

Towards the beginning of Irish author Sally Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, one of the protagonists sends an email to her best friend. She writes, “You should know that our correspondence is my way of holding onto life, taking notes on it, and thereby preserving something of my — otherwise almost worthless, or even entirely worthless — existence on this rapidly degenerating planet”. While this might sound bleak, there’s something moving in this sentiment, in the idea that writing to someone — really writing, with time and attention — is a way of making meaning out of life. 

Emails are, in that sense, an evolution of letter writing. Lord Byron once wrote that “letter writing is the only device combining solitude with good company,” and emails, in many ways, carry forward this legacy. They do so by offering a space that is both private and shared: private, in that the writer can reflect, revise, and dwell on their thoughts, and shared, in that those thoughts are intended for another, and they can transcend distance and time. Emailing also occupies a strange, beautiful space between the immediacy of instant messaging and the formality of traditional letters — there’s room to think of and edit what you really want to say before pressing send, with the option for a quick response that letters never have.

In several of Rooney’s novels, she uses emails as a counterpoint to the spoken world, where her characters can express the parts of themselves that don’t quite fit into casual conversation: the doubts, longings, and contradictions that can only be untangled in the space that written communication demands. The popularity of Rooney’s novels among a certain demographic of readers — often young, educated, and literary (a.k.a much of the St Andrews student demographic) — has helped spark a small-scale resurgence in emailing as a form of expressive communication between peers. In the last year or so, I’ve had multiple people propose emailing as a way of staying in touch, and while several of these people were long-distance, there were a few who live close by and who simply wanted to make space for more thoughtful, reflective conversations than a quick coffee or instant message allows. 

My experiences with emailing have highlighted how starved for real conversation many people of my generation are. In a culture dominated by rapid-fire texts, social media updates, and passing interactions, taking the time to compose an email can feel radical in nature. It demands real patience, attentiveness, and a willingness to linger in thought, both for the writer and the reader. In our writing and reading of emails, my friends and I have reclaimed a sense of intention that the modern digital world so often erodes — a chance to articulate ideas fully and to connect with another person in a way that is both reflective and potentially immediate. In this digital space, we’ve found the form of intimacy that Rooney captures so poignantly: an intimacy born not from proximity, but from the shared labour of paying attention to life, and to one another. 

Illustration by Ramona Kirkham