[zoeysmithe]

You're reading cherry-picked letters from verbose and emotional writers, not random Joes. The poorly written ones don't make it to venues like this. Comparing this to someone's busy social media feed is a bit disingenuous. Not to mention for all you know, some of these people can write love letters like this, but why should you know that? You're not the object of their love.

The same way probably no one in these people's lives knew they wrote love letters like this while they were alive.

Not to mention that "love letter writing" was a form of social obligation, courtship norms, and even PUA-like tactics back then for many people and not always the sincere original poetry modern people like us might think it is.

Its a lot of people lifting phrases and ideas from others to please or even manipulate current or potential lovers. Some of these soldiers had several women back home and wrote many letters to all of them, maximizing their odds of a relationship or sex when they are discharged. While I certainly believe in romantic love, I also think its important to remember people in the past weren't different from us and some of this is disingenuous writing or seen as honest but exaggerated rote obligation, and not often this expression of deep love that suddenly turns a dullard borderline illiterate into a prolific writer of poetic love letters. This is a practiced pretension and artform and our history has always had elaborate courtship ritual just like near any other animal has.

We just don't practice this often today, but if you decided to learn the art of love letters, you'd be just as good as any of these people over time I imagine. You probably won't because that's seen as an out of style courtship ritual, and instead you probably are good at other, more modern, courtship rituals.