Murmured Amour — Writing love letters, anniversary | murmuredamour.com
Short formats have hard limits: 160 characters for a plain SMS, 70 once an emoji appears, and 40 to 50 handwritten words on a postcard.
An SMS written in plain text holds up to 160 characters. Add one emoji or one special accented character and the message switches to Unicode, cutting the budget to 70. Decide whether the emoji is worth ninety characters before you write — not after the message splits in two.
Counted examples that fit even the 70-character limit: 'Home is wherever you are.' (25 characters), 'Still you. Always you. Only you.' (32), 'Ten years, and you still make Tuesdays feel like Saturdays.' (59). All three leave room for a name.
On narrow screens, swipe or scroll the plate sideways.
A plain-text example that uses the full 160-character budget: 'I don't need a special date to tell you: meeting you was the best luck of my life, and loving you is the best decision I make every morning.' — 140 characters, no emoji required.
A standard postcard measures 100 × 150 mm, and its message side holds 40 to 50 handwritten words at normal size — about 2 to 2.5 minutes of writing at 20 words per minute. Sample, at 41 words: 'The view is good, but my first thought was that you would love it here, and every view since has been measured against that thought. Next time we come together. Counting the days. All my love.'
The technique for all short formats is the same: shrink the five-section letter to five sentences, one per section — occasion, memory, gratitude, promise, sign-off. Cut adjectives first, and never cut the year or the name. For the full-length version, the homepage carries the six-step drafting procedure and the structure page the word budgets; for milestone themes, see the anniversary messages page.
Further reading