Made to be broken

Promises are lovely. When they’re made with honesty and kept with reliability, they form the substructure of healthy relationships, the backbone of a well-­functioning society. “Cross my heart and hope to die,” we used to say as kids, having no real idea what those words meant except that they conveyed the zeal of our trustworthiness. We’d then spit on the ground before friends to seal the promise.

Promises may indeed be lovely, but some of them should never be made, and the worst of those deserve to be broken. It can hurt to renege on a promise we’ve made to others or, for that matter, to ourselves. Backing out of a commitment feels like a betrayal of trust or the worst kind of lie. But not every promise made is a good one. Too many are founded more on good intention, fanciful wish, or self-interest than on solid wisdom.

A father breaks the news to his children that despite an earlier promise of an ice cream run, he has a migraine and must head to bed. A mother who’s fed up with Donald Trump’s crude behavior and demeaning rhetoric can’t imagine casting a vote for this GOP standard bearer, but not to do so feels to her like a betrayal of her internal promise to be a lifelong Republican. A girl confides in two friends that her father is sexually abusing her but makes them promise not to tell anyone, fearful that she’ll incur unspeakable punishment if he finds out she talked. Some promises are meant to be broken, even some we make to ourselves. If the harm caused by breaking a promise is less than the harm caused by keeping it, then good moral sense should have us reexamining our obligation to that promise.