It doesn’t matter, really. The myth is elastic, but the symbolism—love, tragedy, longing—holds firm. As I pored over sentences like “I’ve never told anyone this” and “Only you would understand,” I couldn’t help but feel as though the fiction doesn’t cheapen the belief, it just gives it shape.
One letter stumped me. A woman described her troubled seven-year relationship and asked whether she should marry her fiancé or leave him, writing: “I didn’t know who else to turn to but you.”
I’m a fraud, I thought.
I’m not a Shakespearean heroine—I’m a 25-year-old writer from New York who once got a tattoo on a first date for no good reason other than it was raining and the tattoo parlor was dry. Letting me play God in other people’s love lives is the epistolary equivalent of putting a man with a podcast in charge of national diplomacy. What a strange responsibility it is to be Juliet. How could anyone be expected to inherit a voice once occupied by history’s most famed playwright?
I was not alone in my doubts. Camilla said she often wrestled with how to reply, recalling one letter from an American woman who was questioning her sexuality, unsure of whether to speak openly about it with her husband or explore it in secret until she was absolutely certain.
“It’s hard because you’re embodying this character, who is supposed to be nice and romantic and very caring,” Camilla said, “but at the same time, you have your own opinion on relationships, on life, on everything.”
And sometimes, love stories are larger than the people inside them. Decades of letters spanning the globe have shown the secretaries the ways in which politics and history shape matters of the heart. Giovanna once received a letter from a Swedish journalist in love with an imprisoned Black man in apartheid-era South Africa. And just a few years ago, Camilla read one from a Ukrainian woman separated from her Russian boyfriend by war. It would be too easy—and too wrong—to compare these couples to Romeo and Juliet. Star-crossed love isn’t so poetic in real life.
The hardest part of answering letters was not knowing how any of the stories would end. With each response I wrote, I had to accept that I would never know whether I said the right thing, or whether everything would be alright.