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Essay on Promise To Love
It does not make sense to promise to love someone when we do not know what this person will be like, or what we will be like, in the future. This prompts us to wonder whether a promise to love --is conceptually coherent. Does it make any sense to think that we can promise to love? Surely, I can promise to be at your house for dinner on Wednesday, since what I am promising to do can be fulfilled by my own efforts. But promising to love might be a different story. If love is a feeling (or in Kantian terms, an inclination), it would be strange to say that I can promise to love you, to the extent that I cannot bring it about by my own efforts to have feelings.
If love, however, is more significantly concern for the well-being of the beloved (or, in Kantian terms, beneficence), then I can promise to love insofar as whether I do continue to promote your well-being is under my control. (If love is a mixture of inclination and concern, then in some ways it can, and in others it cannot, be promised.) Hence, if the marriage vow makes sense, it must mean that one promises to show concern even if the feeling aspect of love has dissipated. (What would be left to motivate the concern? A sense of one's duty?)
This draws to our attention a second problem: even if one can promise to love, can one promise into the future to continue to love? Is the promise to love that x makes to y in 1985 still binding on x in 2025? Mendus argues that the promise to love makes sense only if it is conceived of as a statement of one's intention and not as a prediction about one's future attitudes or behavior. This distinction is important.................
