14 DAY TRIAL // With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, it becomes clear that people have forgotten how to be romantic and surprise their loved one with a gesture truly coming from the heart, a new survey shows. While they still want to receive love letters and poems on Valentine’s Day, the survey reveals that less and less actually go through the trouble of penning them, choosing instead to type a simple “I luv U” text message.
The survey was performed online by the British National Trust, a charitable organization in charge of preserving and displaying famous love letters penned by the likes of Darwin and Churchill, the Daily Mail informs. Over 2,500 adults took part in it, but the results were none too pleasing for the Trust, which reported a considerable fall in the percentage of people still going for old-school romanticism. Love like we know it from books is on the verge of extinction, the only logical conclusion seems to be.
Of the 2,500 queried individuals, 62 percent came clean about never writing as much as a love small note (let alone a full-length letter) to the one they loved, while only one in five admitted to inditing a love poem. Oppositely, 69 percent said they expressed their feelings by means of an “I love you” text message or email, which can only mean that one form of creativity is being slowly replaced by another, which is, as it happens, less creative, as the Trust points out.
“As a country, we have produced some of the most romantic writing ever produced in any language – from Shakespeare’s sonnets to touching love letters written by Winston Churchill. Even Charles Darwin, while he was busy formulating his theories on natural selection on board the Beagle, found time to send beautifully moving love letters to his childhood sweetheart, Fanny Mosten Owen. Yet now we seem to have forgotten the value of putting our innermost feelings down in writing.” a spokesperson for the National Trust told the Daily Mail on the findings of the survey.
Women, it seems, are the most affected by the lack of romanticism of today’s means of communicating one’s feelings. Whereas 70 percent of the queried females maintained they would rather receive a love letter instead of a plain text, only 53 of the men felt the same way. Similarly, about the same percentage of women admitted to secretly want their partners to be more romantic, with a little over 59 of males agreeing on this point. Oddly enough, 14 percent of the females pointed out to have never surprised their partner with a romantic gesture, while only 8 percent of men did the same.