Finding a snail mail pen pal used to be pretty easy. All one had to do was check the personal columns of newspapers and magazines and write to any pen pal club that had its ads there, but the Internet changed all that. People abandoned snail mail clubs in favor of Internet dating sites; However, there are people who are not computer literate or prefer to communicate with others in the old fashioned way, the advantages of this are the dangers of Internet dating compared to correspondence by letter. What could be more personal than receiving a handwritten letter in the mail?
So how do you make initial contact when there are so few in the correspondence clubs who advertise in the newspapers? The most obvious answer to that is to do a Google search for pen pal clubs. I know it may sound contradictory to my statements above, but some snail mail pen pal clubs have gone online but still retain the snail mail option. Some security measures must be implemented when making any initial contact online and that includes not using an email address in any advertisement you place or setting up a separate email address for the sole purpose of finding a pen pal.
Writing to foreign newspaper editors is another way to find pen pals. Again, you can do a Google search to find the addresses of local newspapers in the areas where you’d like to make new friends. This may result in some queries.
Another option is that you can make initial contact through dating sites, but state in your profile that you are looking for pen pals. There will be a certain number of people who prefer to contact this way.
I started writing to pen pals in 1985 after noticing an advertisement for a pen pal club in a British magazine and ended up subscribing to their dating magazine. Most of the magazine’s advertisements were from the UK. I wrote to several who advertised, but my biggest responses came when I placed my own ad in the magazine. I got about 30 responses from some of the ads I placed and some that I clicked on and met with when I traveled to the UK. Other people who started writing as pen pals ended up marrying them, whether they intended to or not, who knows? It just shows you that a fascinating hobby like writing to pen pals can have a huge impact on the course of your life.