The Promise to Promise

So, when you ask someone to marry you, and she says yes, she is promising to promise at a later date. Yeah, I know, it's old news, everybody knows it, but it's never struck me quite like it did recently. It's unique to the process of getting married, and yet there are echoes of it everywhere.

From one standpoint, it's a waiting period, so that people can figure out whether or not they want to do what they said they would do. The other standpoint is much more immediate; you promise the one so that you can reach the point where you can promise the other. Either a trial period, or an intermediate step into intimacy.

Believe it or not, this is how we govern ourselves. We hold ourselves to our promises. These promises grow, and overlap; often the promise to your children, your spouse, your parents, etc... are all variations on the same theme. The promise made as a child therefore leads to the promise you made as an adult, unless you've bought into the trial period idea. That's where I think we've lost our way, and, of course, the government is always happy to step in. By law, everything is a trial period. Adultery is perfectly legal in all 50 states; you can't even get civil damages from either of the offending parties, despite the fact a contract has been broken.

We need more promises. And we need respect for them from all levels of authority. It's much more reasonable to expect a person to live by the law he himself agreed to, than to live by law created by men and women who do not know him. As transparency increases, self-governance shall increase as well. After all, the "expert" is one who trades on the scarcity of knowledge, regardless of whether or not he has any himself.