What a nice thought, Anessa!
Well, to begin with, a good thank-you note is greatly enhanced if the recipient understands something of the background context to the gratitude being expressed. I see that you describe this person as ‘a former friend’, so I am therefore assuming that he or she is not up to speed with the current circumstances of yourself and your boyfriend.
To be truly meaningful, your letter to this person ought therefore to cover the following:
Introduction
- General overview of the place love plays in the lives of human beings. Your analysis may be brief or long, depending on the perceptiveness you can bring into play.
Background situation
- Description of the condition in which you and your boyfriend existed prior to the occurrence of love between you, including any negative motivational factors such as loneliness, depression, boredom, alienation, worries about school, interfering parents/siblings etc, or any other factors which drove you towards love.
Analysis of need
- Explanation of the particular motivations which you and your boyfriend had for falling in love.
Needs-based strategies for engaging in a love-based relationship
- For each of you, the application of your respective cognitive and emotional states to developing a suitable behavioural strategy for attaining the status of being in love. Include a description of the obstacles envisaged and the methods planned for overcoming them. How specific were your objectives, i.e. did you and your boyfriend set out to capture each other’s affections exclusively, or was there room along the way for desperate experimentation and/or meaningless sexual encounters? Don’t forget to include the planned role, if any, which you or your current BF intended for your former friend to play in establishing the love between you.
Implementation phase of the love-directed strategy
- How you both put your strategies into practice, and the extent to which they cohered with the planning stage in each case.
- Problems or synergies (negative or positive) observed during the implementation phase.
- Your friend’s role in bringing you together.
- Conclusion of the implementation phase, either unofficial or official (if applicable).
Effectiveness and efficiency of the implementation
- How effective were the strategies you applied?
- Were the resources you each deployed adequate for the purpose? Did you use them as efficiently as you could? Could you have achieved the same (or better) results using fewer resources? How else could the mechanics of the process have been improved?
Post-infatuation evaluation
- Assessment of the relevance, impact and added value deriving from your experience of falling in love. Include a description of your current situation, and the extent to which it meets your original expectations. Is there anything about it which you would change, given the opportunity? What feedback would you like to give your partner about your mutual experience of love-seeking and his role in it?
- On the basis of what you have learned so far, what new emotional or behavioural follow-on projects do you consider feasible or desirable?
- What were the particular strengths and weaknesses of your respective approaches to the planning and implementation of your efforts to find love?
- Are there any lessons learned which could be useful to others, perhaps through mutual information-sharing?
- Did your friend's input in the process of introducing you and your boyfriend meet your expectations? What improvements (if any) do you think would have enhanced it?
Conclusion
- Reiteration of the importance of your friend’s role in bringing you together, with a restatement of your thanks.
I believe your friend will be very pleasantly surprised that you have taken so much trouble to let him/her know what their input has meant to you both, especially because it is all written by hand.
May I wish you both the best of luck for the future! (But remember, being lucky is generally the outcome of effective planning!)
Reply from Erik Kowal ( - England)