The Emotional Affair I Had That Lasted 60 Years

Without ever touching, we had a deep love.

Bette Ann Moskowitz

Published September 17, 2026

Illustration of two people facing each other while holding fountain pens, with a soft overlay of a face in the background and an airmail-style border framing the composition

Yasmine Gateau

This is a love story about two people who never touched, met in person less than a dozen times, yet remained true for over 60 years.

My professor was a short, round man with a stalk of frizzy hair that stood straight up from his head. He was rather forbidding as he strutted around the classroom, pitching complicated bits of conversational Italian to the many undergrads getting rid of their last foreign language prerequisite. Everything about his manner said he knew how totally uninterested we were in mastering his native language.

It was spring 1960, senior year, and I was busy writing and directing the annual college music performance, on the brink of undergraduate greatness, feeling my oats. I had no interest in an Italian class (without which I would be three credits short of graduation). In fact, I tempted fate by hiding my director script (which I would study) inside the large Italian text open on my desk, ready to jump into answer mode as the professor made his way around the room.

But one afternoon he made a quick detour, and before I could stop him, he plucked my script from its hiding place.

After class, to my surprise, instead of scolding me, he asked about the script, and I told him about the show. His interest was intoxicating, and I found myself telling him about my dreams of becoming a writer of plays and poems. He listened, then said since I wasn’t paying attention anyway, not to come back to class. He told me to just put everything into my upcoming show, which he would attend, and if he deemed it worthy, he would give me a passing grade in conversational Italian.

Unusual? Risky? Illegal? Yes! But I accepted the challenge, and as unlikely as it was, the professor came to the performance, titled “Sing,” and I got my passing grade. When I thanked him, he gave me another challenge — unofficial, but at that point how could I refuse? — to enter one of my poems for publication in the Anthology of College Poetry.

It became my first published piece. He didn’t teach me much Italian, but he did show me that for my dreams to come true, I had to act on them.

After Mino — we were on a first-name basis by then — went back to Italy to teach at the University of Rome, and I graduated, we corresponded. I can only guess what my letters were like (both hopeful and pretentious, I suspect). But I can tell you about his, because I kept them all.

Reading them now, their small, faded script on thin, blue airmail paper, they seem flowery and passionate, the kind of language you might read between literary characters in a book. They reflected my excitement about my first job, writing publicity for Decca Records, where I met famous recording artists.

And though he cheered me on, he also kept challenging me to aspire to something more. He was affectionate and cranky: Why waste time writing about record stars, he asked, when I should be paying attention to my own gifts? He was sure that if I went the “traditional” way of young women, my writing would get lost. So, when I told him I met my husband-to-be, he gave me outrageous advice, one letter ending, “Write soon and don’t get married … Love if you can, but above all, Live.”

Of course, though, I was just another typical American girl of that era, wanting to get her MRS. before she was 30. Getting married was exactly what I wanted to do.

And so I did. Had two children. And as Mino predicted, writing got buried beneath a full family life. Our correspondence gradually ended. And yet, I didn’t forget his belief in me, and eventually I began writing again.

In 1988, when my first novel was published, I realized how important Mino’s fierce encouragement had been, and I wanted to tell him so. So, after a gap of 20 years, I tracked him down. He was as warm and enthusiastic as ever, now more friend than mentor.

He was mid-career as a scholar, often focusing on gender inequality, researching the causes that prevent women’s access to power. We talked about our writing lives. Some years went by with no letters, but I always felt we were somehow still in touch. And when, in the early 2000s, I published a memoir about my mother’s old age and dementia (Do I Know You?), amazingly, Mino found out about it, contacted me, convinced me to seek publication in Italy, found me a publisher, and Do I Know You? became Ma Tu Chi Sei?

After that, we corresponded regularly, and the ease of email (with occasional phone calls) kept us at it until his death, at 97, in 2024. He published many books on the subject of gender inequality and the power of women, and I can’t help thinking that helping me (and who knows how many other women?) was part of that subject, and the passion that created his work.

You know how you can miss someone you hardly know? That is how I feel about the professor. Although it didn’t occur to me during those long years, reading his letters now has me thinking that what I thought of as an affair of the mind was also, in some elusive way, an affair of the heart. Odd, long-distance, between two strangers, but certainly love.

Have you ever experienced an emotional affair? Let us know in the comments below.

Bette Ann Moskowitz is a former songwriter, writer of fiction (Leaving Barney and Reading the Signs: A Schoolhouse Mystery) and non-fiction (the memoir, Do I Know You: A Family’s Journey Through Aging and Alzheimer’s and Finishing Up: On Aging and Ageism). Her most recent novel, Three Legs in the Evening, was published in 2023. She is a past recipient of the New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for Literary Non-Fiction. Her blog, Vinegar Mother (vinegarmother.wordpress.com) is eight years old and still ongoing.