This "Snail Mail Swap" Is Rewriting Adult Friendships

At 42, Lacey Richter’s social life almost stalled out. She lives in Austin, TX, where she’s raising a teenager and runs a kids retail shop, and lately it seemed her circle was shrinking.

“It’s really hard to make friends when you’re older. You’re just working and parenting and you’re literally just tired,” she tells Popsugar.

Of all things, it was a fateful Instagram scroll that cracked her world back open. In January, one of her dopamine-follows, Australian craft evangelist Martina Calvi (@martinamartian), announced the start of a snail mail swap, encouraging her followers to comment on the post in search of new pen pals. It was the second year in a row Calvi had offered something like this, and Richter’s first time adding herself to the mix. She commented on the thread — one of nearly 7,000 — identifying herself as a “small business operator/taylor swift super fan/single mom to a teenage girl & handsome cat fella.” A few months later, she had three consistent pen pals in her rotation.

The snail mail swap community that Calvi kick-started casts a wide net but appeals to a particular kind of journaling and letter-writing enthusiast. In our screen-obsessed world, snail mail itself is nostalgic, but the mail these pen pals send is far more elaborate than the simple handwritten notes that many millennials grew up sending to faraway camp friends back in the 1990s and early aughts. Many of Calvi’s fans are crafters themselves, so they adorn their mail with stickers and trinkets and sometimes original art and designs.

It’s snail mail for the digital age: as much about the aesthetic of the contents as the messages they contain — prime fodder for photographs or scans that can be shared as “inspo” on social media. And in that way, Calvi has opened the door for thousands of chronically online types to embrace an analog hobby that straddles both the on- and offline worlds.

“The snail mail swap started as a way to bring people together through tangible creativity,” Calvi tells PS. “I’m passionate about offline community-building, and something about letter-writing is so nostalgic and intentional and completely at odds with the instant nature of communication online.”

There’s a belief that there’s value in sharing more than what can be gleaned from a post on a screen.

The swap — and the thousands of pen pal relationships it’s sparked — have been a reminder for Richter of how isolating social media overuse can be, and how draining it is to rely on social media as one’s primary mode of connection. But the swap is not an especially anti-internet or luddite approach. The pen pals likely would never have been introduced without social media, after all. Many of them now follow each other on Instagram, and some post about their snail mail escapades. Still, there’s a belief that there’s value in sharing more than what can be gleaned from a post on a screen — and that there’s a different, more personal way to share it.

“I hadn’t sent letters in such a long time that I forgot you don’t get the letter back in a day,” Richter laughs. “It’s not the instant gratification that we’re used to.”

She grew up pen palling with her kindergarten best friend several years before the proliferation of social media, and remembers the whole thing feeling different. It was very old-school, she says, whereas now she gets to relive it, but with “even more cool things than there used to be.”

For her 21-year-old pen pal, however, a world with social media is the only world she’s known. Richter cherishes their generational divide, having received letters from that pen pal about moving in with her first longterm boyfriend, and about figuring out her passions at college. “It feels so pure, she just has her whole life ahead of her,” Richter says. “It’s really sweet to read about, and to tap back into that kind of feeling myself.”

Another of Richter’s pen pals, however, is at a more similar life stage. Jessie Turbiville, 31, is a fellow mom, business owner, and Texan. She grew up pen palling through an American Girl program in the early 2000s, and has been dedicated to the analog arts ever since. Though she’s now married, Turbiville was single and 18 when she was pregnant with her daughter. Richter and Turbiville have connected over their shared experiences with everything from single motherhood to therapy and running a business.

“We have a quiet understanding that no matter what capacity we’re each in, whatever is sent is welcomed and appreciated as enough.”

“It’s hard to find and connect with women (sometimes just in general, ha) who are a little ahead of you — willing to share what they’ve learned and what they’re still figuring out,” Turbiville wrote over email. “Pen palling with Lacey feels easy. It’s like we have a quiet understanding that no matter what capacity we’re each in, whatever is sent is welcomed and appreciated as *enough*.”

While it’s a fluke that all of Richter’s pen pals are based in or near Texas, many thousands of commenters came to Calvi’s post from all over the world. In this way, the snail mail swap has allowed people like Sanyukta Shandilya, one of the swap’s more prolific and committed pen pallers, to “travel” the world vicariously. Based in New York City, Shandilya regularly corresponds with people on multiple continents and collects the treasures they send her, like collages, photos, candies, tea packets, family recipes, and postcards.

When she told her Italian pen pal that she’s always wanted to see Italy, she received dozens of recommendations in the mail about the most over- and underrated spots to visit. Another pen pal, based in Mexico, sometimes sends Shandilya original photographs with Spanish writing on the back, which Shandilya plugs into Google Translate. She also has longstanding exchanges with pen pals in Australia and one in Hong Kong.

Shandilya returns the favor when she can, too, like last year when she visited her parents in India for three weeks. The packages she sent out right after that trip were some of her favorites, filled with regional Indian stamps, cloth coasters she picked up from a flea market, and newspaper clippings with lines about her hometown. It was on that trip that she discovered a whole trove of old postcards she’d received in her childhood from her dad, who was away for long stretches of time for work. Those cards had meant enough for her to hold onto them for over 20 years.

Turbiville and Richter keep everything they receive from their pen pals, too. Turbiville has an elaborate filing system for the originals and even scans and saves digital copies of all her snail mail, often posting the spreads on her Instagram, which Richter follows. Richter secretly always hopes her mail will make the cut, which motivates her to ensure all of her sends are extra cute — even the letters that are a little bit more emotional.

Recently Richter was working on a letter to Turbiville as the anniversary of a loss loomed, she says. She wanted to share some of how that was making her feel, but first asked Turbiville if she’d be comfortable receiving mail from her that dealt with some heavier stuff. Turbiville gave her the green light, and assured her she could tell her everything.

“It’s this weird safeness that you feel. There’s no judgment,” Richter says of her pen pal connections. “I can’t wait to write this super serious letter and then put Hello Kitty stickers all over it.”

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Emma Glassman-Hughes (she/her) is the associate editor at PS Balance. In her seven years as a reporter, her beats have spanned the lifestyle spectrum; she’s covered arts and culture for The Boston Globe, sex and relationships for Cosmopolitan, and food, climate, and farming for Ambrook Research.


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