In late June, the content creator Em-J Staples posted an open call on TikTok to play matchmaker for anyone who wanted a “summer buddy” pen pal. “I had a pen pal in Girl Scouts growing up,” said Staples, 37, and, as a millennial and a mother to a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old, “I want to relive my summers with them.”
“I was nostalgic for a ’90s summer,” she added.
The Bay Area resident didn’t anticipate going viral, but she received over 330,000 views over the following few weeks, with 14,000 individuals signing up either for email or snail mail correspondence. She paired pen pals through a compatibility questionnaire she had made on Google Forms.
As of late, zillennials have been finding delight — and refuge from a complicated world — in all that exudes “whimsy,” a word that is now internet shorthand to characterize playful and spontaneous lifestyle choices. (Related: going Luddite, all things analog and “grandma hobbies.”)
Mallory Ensing, 20, a sophomore at the University of Michigan, found her pen pal, Simme S., 20, a junior at Penn State who asked to go by her last initial for privacy, in late January, after responding to Simme’s open call on TikTok.
The two previously followed each other as fans, but now primarily interact by handwritten letter every three to four weeks (they have never met in person). “They’re really in depth,” Ensing said of the letters. Or “sometimes it’s just like, ‘Oh, this is the music I listened to this week.’ It’s something as simple as that. But then we’re also asking each other questions.”
“I’m definitely more shy and introverted, so letters give me time to think about what I want to say,” Simme wrote in a direct message. “There’s no pressure to respond right away or keep a conversation going in real time.”
As 2026 would have it, posting offline hobbies has become content of its own: “Both of us consistently post videos of sending each other letters,” said Ensing, who has over 24k followers on TikTok; Simme has nearly 18k.
Ensing attributes the resurgence to a collective craving for personal connections that build gradually over time, and often that means not feeling pressure to meet in real life.
Sophia Hue, 21, a college senior in Idaho, has two pen pals she connected with over social media and with whom she’s been corresponding for eight months. “We don’t have a set time when we need to respond to each other,” she said. ”There’s a comfort element that you don’t have to see them face to face.”
Of course, some people do meet face to face. Juliana Romeo, 33, is an active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force, currently stationed in Germany. For the last four years she has been writing handwritten letters to four different pen pals she connected with on TikTok, and recently went to Manchester, England, to meet one in person. “It could have been sketchy, but she was incredible,” Romeo said. “I stayed with her and we went stationery shopping and had a whole weekend together.”
There is no one way to best find a pen pal. Some do it in social media comments sections, posting to their Story or, like Hue in the case of one pen pal, taking a risk and reaching out through DMs.
“It’s not necessarily about moving away from technology,” said Agus Panzoni, the head of culture strategy at the trend and media platform Death To Stock (DTS). “It’s about moving away from a format of communication that is mediated by platforms and digital systems that optimize speed, convenience and infinite access.”
According to Panzoni, having a pen pal has steadily been on the rise since 2020, which is also when matchmakers started popping up. “We were already seeing the rise of pen pal matching services on TikTok through the comment sections happening during the pandemic,” she said.
For Valentine’s Day this year, Emma Orhun, a 27-year-old internet artist in Toronto, garnered traction after posting, asking to be a “pen pal wingman.”
For the first round, 23,000 people signed up and filled out an interest-based questionnaire. “People are lonelier than ever. Our screen time is so high. Everyone is depressed and ordering Uber Eats,” she said. “It’s a low effort way to connect with someone you normally wouldn’t.”
In mid-July, Rachel Syme, a staff writer at The New Yorker, posted to Instagram offering to couple pen pals for the summer.
Previously, in the spring of 2020, Syme, who lives in Brooklyn and is in her early 40s, founded Penpalooza, a pen pal exchange that peaked at 15,000 subscribers. Currently, she matches correspondents through her DMs since noticing people’s continued hunger for letter exchanges after the world opened up again. (Her first book, “Syme’s Letter Writer,” published in 2025, is a guide to modern correspondence and letter-writing etiquette).
“People feel really alienated from one another. There’s no safe place to communicate where you’re not doing it out in public,” she said, referencing the loneliness epidemic, increasing backlash to A.I. and the digital surveillance state.
“The mail,” she added, “feels sacred.”
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