Welcome to Love Week, a week-long, mini package of features dedicated to all things romantic in music and culture. We've curated playlists of our favorite love (and anti-love) songs, dug deep into legendary sex anthems, and created instructionals on how to write a proper love letter. Whether you're coupled up or single, let us help you get into the mood.

There’s nothing more romantic than telling someone how you feel. Sure, we used to rely on the upper-case Romantics — Keats, Byron, Shelley — and the lower-case — Henry Miller, Leonard Cohen, Virginia Woolf — to help us utter sweet nothings. But in a sex and intimacy-starved era, the art of the love letter is on life support.

The antidote to the pervasive shrug that defines modern-love courtship, an endless purgatory where it’s a miracle if you even get to meet someone in person and not just DM each other until one of you deactivates for mental-health reasons, is actually quite simple: Subjugate yourself. Tell someone they’re hot. Flirt with abandon. Make an actual… wait for it…plan.

It’s something that poets have always done, and it's a skill that Alex Dimitrov, Matt Starr, and Aria Aber, three accomplished poets who specialize in spinning the erotic into heart-racing text, have mastered to a tee. Ahead, just in time for Valentine’s Day, we asked each of them for their tips on how to revive the art of the love letter, whether it’s crafted in the DMs, over text, or even on paper.

Some people send songs, but Aria Aber, author of the novel Good Girl and the poetry collection Hard Damage, sends poems. Her go-to poets for butterflies-in-stomach feels are Sandra Lim, Linda Gregg, Frank O'Hara, and Ocean Vuong (though the latter is a little darker).

“I am an obsessive reader and I find it extremely difficult to talk about love or my feelings. It's the most universal feeling, but it's also the one that has been talked about the most, and there's almost no original way to say it,” she says, referencing a line from “Naxos” by Sandra Lim: “I love you, I wish there was some more / original way of saying it.” Poetry, she says, helps us say the thing we want to say in a more indirect but profound way.

​​Alex Dimitrov, whose poetry collection Ecstasy is out in April, loves to slide in the DMs, where he’s direct and consciously flirty. “It's always good to tell people that you find them hot,” Dimitrov says, adding that people often respond well, given the unromantic era we’re living in. “I think that the culture in the last 10 years probably has been so anti-sex and anti-sensuality that I think people respond really quickly to just being told that they're hot or just directly asking them on a date.”

Really, it all comes back to making a gesture — seeing if someone can volley back your playful energy. Or in Dimitriov’s case, getting straight to setting a date. “I'll slide into a DM and be like, ‘meet you for a drink at Bar Oliver tonight at 7.’ I mean, that's crazy,” he says. “But if you have a person who's really playful, it sets the tone. It's not serious.”

For Matt Starr, author of MOUTHFUL and founder of the New York City-based literary club Dream Baby Press, true eroticism is about spinning shame into delicate webs of intimacy. At a writing club Starr recently hosted, one of the prompts he posed was: Write a step-by-step guide on how to seduce you.

“You have to try to tap into your most private thoughts and feelings and get those down on paper,” Starr says. “The things you want to do to the person and the places you want to take them. Every dirty thought you have. You can’t feel shame when you’re trying to express yourself and write a love letter.”

But Starr also believes writing a good love letter is as much about the act of writing as it is its contents. It’s not just about the confession of feelings, but the build-up and effort.

“Writing it and going to a post office is so antiquated that the act of a love letter is equally as powerful as what’s written on it,” Starr says. “You want to be direct but add some romance — it can’t just be from private parts to paper. When you listen to a song, you don’t just get the chorus, you need the build-up. Good sex is all the stuff that comes from before it. Frankly, that’s the best stuff.”

One of the metaphors in Dimitrov’s viral 2022 poem “Soul Fucking” surrounds an orange, which was inspired by a suggestion from the poet Linda Gregg, who once told Dimitrov to bring an orange to a guy he liked. When you have a crush on someone, Dimitrov says, you should disarm them.

“I ended up doing it,” Dimitrov says. “I was supposed to meet him for something and I brought him an orange and he was like, ‘what's that?’ I was like, ‘oh, like I brought you an orange.’ I totally downplayed it. And he was like, ‘Wait, what? That's so wild. Why did you think I like oranges?’ It’s a piece of fruit; what's the worst that could happen? But it's so charming and it totally worked.”