I analyzed [12,347] love letters without opening a single one
I run two letter sites. Digital Letter , where you pick a design, write a note, seal it in a digital envelope, and send it with a link. And Open When Letters , where you write letters ahead of time, each one sealed until the moment it was written for. "Open when you miss me." "Open when it's your birthday." Last week I wanted to know what people actually write on them. On [October 1st] I ran the…
Digital Letter and Open When Letters are two letter sites run by the author. Open When Letters allows users to write letters ahead of time, sealed until the specific moment they were intended for. Last week, the author analyzed 12,347 sealed letters and 3,812 open-when envelopes from the database.
The median letter contains 89 words, shorter than expected. About a quarter of the letters have fewer than 35 words, while a tenth exceed 250 words. The longest letter contains 612 words. A significant portion of letters contain emojis, with an average of 5.1 emojis per letter. The eight most frequently used emojis are ❤️, 😭, 🥹, 😘, 💌, 🤍, 🎂, and 🫶.
When stopwords are removed from the 1,4XX,XXX words of text, the 31st most commonly written word is "sorry," and the 88th is "proud." People apologize almost three times more often than they express pride in someone. The study found that open-when letters are often used to express difficult emotions, such as apologies or confessions, rather than motivation.
The author accidentally discovered a timezone bug that caused Valentine's Day letter openings to be mislabeled. The correct number of letters opened on local Valentine's Day was X, while 61% were opened on February 13th and 15th. This discrepancy was due to the database storing each letter's target moment with its timezone at creation time, and comparing local dates instead of UTC ones.
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