'Ever thine, ever mine, ever ours.'

With Valentine’s Day approaching, it feels timely to look beyond the usual gestures and return to words. Long before chocolates, algorithms, or last-minute bouquets, love was shaped carefully on paper, with time, intention, and attention to language. Writing a letter asks us to slow down, to choose words deliberately, and to sit with what we actually want to say.

One of the most enduring examples is Ludwig van Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved letter. Written in 1812 and never sent, the letter was discovered after his death, its recipient still unknown. What remains is not certainty, but intensity. The letter moves between longing, restraint, devotion, and frustration, capturing love as something lived with complexity rather than perfection.

Beethoven’s letter endures because it shows what love letters can do that other gestures cannot. They hold contradiction. They allow room for doubt as well as devotion. Written words stay, not just as evidence of feeling, but as a record of how someone once tried to understand their own heart.

In our digital world where most expressions of love are brief, disposable, or quickly forgotten, a letter offers something different. It can be returned to, reread, and kept. It gives weight to emotion by giving it form.

Below, you’ll find the full text of the Immortal Beloved letter. Read it not simply as a historical document, but as a reminder of the power of writing love down, and of how words, once committed to paper, can outlast both the moment and the person who wrote them:

6th - 7th July, 1812

Teplitz

6th July, morning

My angel, my all, my very self—

Only a few words today, and that in pencil (with yours). Not until tomorrow will my lodging be definitively determined; what a worthless waste of time on such things—why this deep sorrow when necessity speaks—can our love endure otherwise than through sacrifices, than by not demanding everything from one another; can you change the fact that you are not entirely mine, I am not entirely yours? Oh God, look at nature in all its beauty and calm, and consider that we must live by what is ordered, not only for ourselves but for others.

6th July, evening

You suffer—you, my dearest creature. I notice the thought of our separation makes me even more miserable than you. Just be calm, because calmness is the only thing we can achieve by our will. Whether we shall see each other soon or not, I can only resign myself to fate. Love demands everything and rightly so.

7th July, morning

Good morning, on July 7th!

Still in bed, thoughts crowding on me about you, my Immortal Beloved. Now and then joyful, then sad again, awaiting fate. That I must live either wholly with you or not at all. Yes, I have resolved to wander far from you until I can fly into your arms and say that I am fully at home with you, send my soul wrapped up in the love you inspire.

Ever thine.

Ever mine.

Ever ours.