Should my partner and I share our love letters from previous relationships with our children?

Illustration: Guardian Design

We are in our mid-80s and have been together for 12 years.

Our relationship journeys to our meeting point were utterly different. My partner has two marriages behind her as well as a long-term partner. Mine was a marriage of over 40 years. My partner and I were colleagues for many years before our retirements.

The issue/opportunity is that we have, between us, at least a shoebox full of love letters from our various relationships. One of mine was from a teenage crush in the late 1950s and with whom I still have the occasional chat.

So what to do with them?

Should our children be the recipients? Should they be burned? Maybe they could provide some insight into “that crazy little thing called love”! Or could they be a valuable source of information for a writer/researcher?

I wouldn’t destroy them. Letters are a rich source of both family and social history and remind us how we felt. I don’t know what your letters contain, but a local museum might also be interested. Sometimes, seemingly domestic details can be fascinating as a historical document. I’m very glad that, in my teenage letters, I documented what I wore, the weather, how much things cost and what I spent. At the time a little boring, perhaps, but now a fascinating insight into the past (at least, for me).

I went to psychotherapist Alison Roy with your question. Roy does a lot of work with “family stories”, as much of her work is in the adoption field. While this isn’t relevant to your situation, I was interested in her take on what to do. The first thing Roy wanted to check is if you are both singing from the same hymn sheet – ie, are you both comfortable with each other’s stories? That would be good to check.

“I think it’s important you go through them together to make sure there’s nothing in there you don’t want the children to see,” says Roy. “If what’s in them is indeed comfortable and there’s no fear or anxiety, then you need to think, individually and together, about how important they are in terms of how their stories are told.”

Unless you’ve read the letters very recently, this is an exercise worth doing together, to make sure there are no family secrets or even seemingly “little” details that might cause a big impact that the family doesn’t already know.

There could be things that might not be obviously impactful if you already know about them. So if you have a friend you trust, they could read them for you, seeing what questions are thrown up.

Unless you’ve read the letters very recently, this is an exercise worth doing together, to make sure there are no family secrets

Did any relationships overlap, for instance? Was there anything that might raise eyebrows? I don’t say this in a moralistic way, but these things might need more context – context is key in family history.

As Roy explains, when we go to art galleries, what gives the pictures we see their stories is often the notes alongside the art. She suggested you might want to consider writing “your own little letter about your love letters, your story, and why these letters are important, why you’ve decided to keep them. In other words, a love letter to the people you are still connected to, a letter that completes the cycle.”

It can feel quite understandably excluding to read letters between your parents, or between them and other people, so this idea of Roy’s is a lovely way to include them, and “it gives them permission to be part of it and enjoy it, rather than feeling voyeuristic”.

If you had any photographs that completed the picture it would be great to annotate them, maybe even make a scrapbook. This is a lovely gift to pass on. So much is taken for granted with family history and so much is lost when key members aren’t there any more. Roy also suggested making a “notebook for each child” where you might want to put memories for them to read.

I think these letters are a great opportunity for connection and storytelling, and if your children don’t want to keep them when the time comes then that’s up to them. But give them the opportunity.

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