Noelle McCarthy: Digital declarations come back to bite

When I was 19 I spent a summer in California under the auspices of my American aunt. It was an enlightening time in my development.

As well as introducing me to the sophisticated delights of spa pools, See's candies and Absolut Limon shots, Auntie also furnished me with two invaluable pieces of relationship advice.

Always keep a valid passport, and always get your letters back. Innocent that I was, I didn't really understand what she was on about at the time.

I was madly in love with my first boyfriend back home - skipping the country and rescinding my love letters to him were the last thing on my mind. As I recall, I spent a fair bit of my time in San Francisco writing more of them, when I wasn't getting hammered in the spa pool, that is.

Long letters, heartfelt letters, sometimes rambling letters (blame the Absolut). That whole summer is chronicled in letters; the ones I sent and those I got in return.

Do I want mine back? No, not really, he's welcome to them - they were written for him after all.

They were the first proper love letters I ever wrote and I don't regret them.

There are other letters though, that I regret ever writing, regret still more ever posting, either because of the class of the letter I wrote, or because of the class of idiot I sent it to.

And it is this regret that makes me feel sorry for Governor Mark Sanford in his present predicament.

For those of you who might be unfamiliar with the story, Sanford is the Governor of South Carolina whose image as a good family man and staunch Christian was rather badly tarnished when details of his affair with an Argentinian woman, Maria Belen Shapur, were made public last month.

And by details, I mean their entire email correspondence over the course of a number of weeks. And what a correspondence it is.

It's manky to read someone's private letters without permission, I know, but these things sell themselves. By turns hilarious, icky and oddly affecting, they're simply irresistible, demonstrating, as they do, how being a high-flying politician offers no protection against being a total fool for love.

As a correspondent, Sanford is nothing if not ardent, but a tad formulaic.

"Sweetest", "Beloved", "Dearest" are the words he uses to address his lady love. He writes that he misses her. Of course he does. Because he's at home with his wife and kids. He goes on to treat Maria to all of the usual blandishments about her looks - her bosom, her smile, her lovely eyes, as well a lyrical digression on the erotic thrill of her tan lines.

So far, so yada. Men don't tend to take mistresses because they're good at crossword puzzles, do they?

In fairness to Sanford though, his letters are as yearning and heartfelt as any lover's, and there is the odd line in there that might make a girl sigh.

"Do you really comprehend how beautiful your smile is?" he writes. "Have you been told lately how warm your eyes are and how they softly glow with the special nature of your soul?" It's not just the eyes and the bosom doing it for him, but the "special nature" of her soul as well.

There are pages of this sort of thing, with a mad digression about farming in between.

Sanford it seems, likes to till the soil, and details his agricultural pursuits at length in one of his letters. The Freudian implications of all of this ploughing and furrowing notwithstanding, it certainly adds a unique tenor to his missives.

As one blogger pointed out last week, Sanford's is probably the first love letter in history to combine mention of John McCain, Corinthians I and a tractor. What this says about the romantic sensibility of the average American politician is another column in itself.

The point is, though, that anyone who has ever written, or indeed received a love letter cannot but sympathise with poor old Mark Sanford. Love letters are, by their very nature, ridiculous.

As the modern incarnation of the grand tradition of courtly love, they demand an excess of sensibility, of sentimentality, an unfettered outpouring of emotion, rendered all the more acute by its expression. This is especially true in cases where the love in question is in some way frustrated or unsanctioned. In other words, an affair.

Affairs cry out for love letters.The secrecy, the impossibility, the volatility of your average extramarital love affair simply begs to be immortalised in writing.

Which is all well and good if it's pen and ink in question - drawers can be locked, and letters burnt - but another entirely when the billet-doux goes digital.

If it's on the net, it's out there, and can't be taken back, as Sanford has found to his cost.

As for me, I've long since learnt to take Auntie Cay's advice to heart and there's more than one fella around who'll be getting a stamped addressed envelope from me in the not-too-distant future.