Is eternal love possible?

From a moral point of view, one can argue endlessly about whether to consider the love of two for life to be more valuable than love that is ephemeral and changeable. We will never know whether La Rochefoucauld was right when he said that “fidelity, which can only be maintained at the cost of violence against oneself, is no better than treason” *. But no one, I think, will deny the incredible beauty of that feeling that manages to last, while remaining faithful to the word once given. Only within the space and time invented by the lovers themselves can the true reality of love unfold…

Promising eternal love is not naivety or a lie. On the contrary, it is the most truly human and responsible act. To understand why this is so, we need to distinguish between commitment and promise. A commitment is conditional, while a promise is unconditional. When I make a commitment, I accept that external events can become a hindrance.

Reality, as always unpredictable, will serve as my alibi. Therefore, it is absolutely unreasonable to make a commitment to always be in love with one person (and not fall in love with anyone else): we have every reason to believe that life will dispose of it in its own way. But when I promise, I affirm that nothing will ever prevent me from fulfilling the promise. In other words, the promise is unconditional. The promise creates a space outside the world of the social, and in this space no force majeure is possible.

To promise means from the very beginning to exclude any deviation from the given word. A promise is not just a formula, it is a special speech act: the utterance of such a statement is the action that it speaks about**.

It makes me think that it is as irresponsible to make a commitment to be forever in love as honestly to promise eternal love. Because it is important to distinguish between falling in love as a state and love as an action. The state of falling in love depends little on our will, while love is actions in which we are free and which therefore we can promise.

This was perfectly explained by Nietzsche: “You can promise actions, but not feelings, for the latter are involuntary. Whoever promises someone to always love him, or always hate him, or always remain faithful, promises something that is not in his power; but, of course, he can promise action. Couples who love each other all their lives also love their own love: there is he (and he loves her), there is she (and she loves him), but there is also a third – their love, which both love. Only this love of mutual love allows the two to go through time towards eternity, to create their own dimension, which belongs only to the two of them: the eternal present.

* F. de La Rochefoucauld “Maxims” (Eksmo, 2012).

** J. Austin “Word as Action”. New in foreign linguistics, vol. XVII (Progress, 1986).

*** F. Nietzsche “Human, too human” (Azbuka, Azbuka-Atticus, 2012).