In today's world of advanced technology. the absence of one's loved one can be softened immensely by all manner of gadgetry like laptops, computers, mobiles, house phones. However far apart a couple in mad passionate love is today, all manner of communication is available within seconds. Whether the distance between two lovers is a country mile or across the world in another continent, they can message each other, speak to each other, and even see each other in live time.
Now, try to imagine a time in the past when there was no access to current communication technology; not even a house phone for the ordinary person. These were days when any contact that couldn't be carried out face-to-face between sweethearts was carried out by a letter or a public red phone box on the street corner. Such telephone calls were very much a hit and miss affair, as often one's sweetheart would be trying to get through to you while you were impatiently queuing behind six other people waiting to get their tuppence worth in the public phone box.
Imagine what it must have been like for lovers during the 'Second World War' years, with the soldier man on the battlefield and his sweetheart not having had a letter from him for months, fearing him dead in some muddy Flanders' trench or alone, abandoned and left for dead in a wounded condition in a foreign field? Imagine immediately postwar in the 50s and 60s, one sweetheart may be miles away and contact through the red public phone box at a prearranged time of day or night was the only means of instant communication; and only then after the caller had committed to memory the specific number of the phone box in question along with the hope that at the precise moment another chatterbox-person wasn't using that phone box while your sweetheart rapped the glass to ask her to hurry it up!
The point is simply this; whether we are talking today or a hundred years ago. While means of communication were vastly different between the centuries, the intensity of feelings between two people in love, deeply missing each other, was no different or less intense than they are today!
I recall once reading an account of a woman in love during the 'Second World War'. Her sweetheart was a soldier who was fighting on some foreign ground. The woman hadn't had a letter from her soldier sweetheart for four months, despite him writing to her daily from the trenches. One day, twenty of his letters arrived all at once. Overjoyed, she rearranged them in date order to read repeatedly at leisure. In one letter, her soldier sweetheart wrote, "Even though we are separated by the English Channel, I feel your presence alongside me, When I am cold, I feel you snuggle up closer to me. When I fear that I might not make it through the war and survive to marry you, I hear you whisper in the night-time breeze, ' We are married in every thought we have, in everything we do and in all we wish we desire'. Even when we are ordered to advance on the enemy, leave the cold and damp trench and go over the top, though good friends fall and die as I advance with gun in one hand, my other hand holds yours as we run on together. I love you so much. Every time I close my eyes I see you when I open them I miss you."
The French language doesn't precisely have words for saying, 'I miss you', but the French do say, 'Tu me Manques' which literally means 'You are missing from me'."
Love and peace. Bill xxx