I once got a love letter from someone who should not have been sending me a love letter. It wasn't a family member or anything weird like that (sorry, no crazy stories of incest or Oedipus complexes) but it was the boyfriend of someone I cared about very, very much (and still do).
To be honest, I shared some of his feelings but I never said as much. He was very important to me too. I kept the letter for a long time, hidden away, constantly terrified that someone would find it. Eventually I threw it out. At that point the boyfriend was gone from my life and from my friend's life, but I still worried that if I died and someone found the letter it would be too upsetting. Or that I would be seen to be in collusion even though I never responded (he even told me not to) and never reciprocated any hint of affection beyond what would have been acceptable given our relationship.
The letter explained what the boyfriend thought were all of my wonderful qualities. Why I was perfect and special and would find the most amazing person in the world to love me (and how they would be better than him). Some of the things he wrote were things I wished about myself, some of them were things I doubted about myself, and some of them were things that I'd never even thought about myself. That letter did more for my self esteem than anything else in my life, ever. So even though it was wrong, and even though in the letter he acknowledged that he knew it was wrong to be saying all of this and that obviously nothing would ever come of any of it, it was the nicest thing anyone had ever written about/said to me.
Years after that, I got another letter from a male friend of mine along the same vein. He was married, but in an unhappy marriage. He was expressing himself without asking for or expecting anything. He was a good man and he, like the boyfriend, acknowledged that the letter was probably improper and unfair. In this case I had very deep feelings for this man. But he was married and I cannot do that to another woman, even if she is a shrew, even if I don't know her. I just can't. He did eventually leave her, by which time our geography was such an inconvenience, that even though we had mutual feelings, I think we'd missed or shot. And he found someone else and remarried, and last I heard from him, was very happy.
The sad part for me remains that these two letters were the best love letters I have ever received. I guess unfulfilled love is like that. When you're with someone, you don't think to say the wonderful things that these letters said. You don't think you need to say it because you're in the relationship so clearly you love and value that person. (Although, I would add that I think in many cases, you most need to say these things to someone you're in a relationship with because the given isn't always apparent and saying nice things is always, well, nice. But I digress.)
And here I am, many, many years later, still single, with apparently no one else seeing what they saw. It seems hugely unfair. But at least I know that two someones, at sometime, thought all these perfect things about me. I can only hope that isn't the run of my luck.
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