The Man and I have been together for almost three years.  He lives 900 miles away.  I would not recommend long distance relationships to the faint of heart, but we are still going strong, primarily because he never tires of showing how much he loves me.  I am a lucky woman.

In the beginning, we emailed each other a lot.  In fact, we didn’t talk every day on the phone, and would exchange emails as an alternative.  Some were full of mundane, everyday minutiae.  Others were the mortar to our love story, and I can still remember key phrases word for word.

Then two things happened, and I’m not sure which occurred first:

• I stumbled onto Diane Aldred’s website describing how to bind your own book
• I realized that generations that have come before have saved the love letters they have exchanged, often in a big stack tied with ribbon. Our generations’ love letters are much less likely to be saved and savored, and may end up lost in the ether.
  

  A letter from my grandpa to my grandma, dated 1939

I couldn’t let that happen to ours.  They meant too much to me, and were actually a pretty good read.

The process took months (copying and pasting every email into a word document, formatting the document, making sure each page was printed in the correct order, so that you would read them chronologically), and I spent many hours on it.  The book binding was the easiest part, by far, thanks to Diane’s fantastic tutorial.

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In the end, I feel like I saved something precious to us.  The Man said it was quite possibly the best gift he had ever received (awww, shucks!), and I love to pick it up every once in awhile and remember that first flush of the greatest love of my life.