This paper builds upon scholarly studies of emotion as a way bridge the divide between private and public, between the individual and the collective, through an examination of Tunisian youth in the 1960s. More specifically, it looks at love letters written by the predominantly urban, educated, and middle class readers of a fashionable women’s magazine, Faiza. While a minority, these upwardly mobile professionals were overrepresented in the young nation’s universities, intellectual circles, the ruling political party, government, and nationalist civil society organizations. By virtue of their privileged position, they were the most exposed to transnational media, consumerism, and youth culture. In evoking love, they deployed their emotions as communicative tools to convey ideals about gender roles, family life, and the desire for companionate marriage. At least at the moment they were perusing the magazine or writing letters to its editors, these readers formed an emotional community, and they utilized the epistolary genre to articulate the boundaries of new social norms surrounding gender roles, courtship, and the family through a discourse on love. The personal dramas narrated in their letters reveal a sense of self and awareness of generational change that is at once premised upon individual choice and deeply committed to the affective ties of the family. They suggest an individuation inherent to romantic love and companionate marriage that scholars associate with the modern subject but one that contradicts the assumption that the modern self exists in tension with family. Conversations about monogamy and companionate marriage dated at least to the beginning of the twentieth century in Tunisia as elsewhere in the Middle East. This paper considers the impact of national independence, the expansion of education, and personal status legislation on the notion of love as it was expressed and represented in the 1960s. Such topics were frequently debated in the pages of Faiza in features on mixed marriage, women and education, and women and employment. They came to a climax in a series of articles, interviews, and a stream of letters to the editors framed as “a debate about love.” How did particular configurations of youth make romantic love more acceptable? Why were certain patterns of courtship deemed a sign of modernity, while others were not? In asking such questions, I hope to delineate how the discourse on love, ideals of romance and courtship, constructed certain Tunisians as modern subjects while excluding others.