A Pinky Promise

“Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.” So say children when making promises to one another, the most solemn of all oaths.

Closely related to this is the “pinky promise” (also known as the “pinky swear”) made from one young person to another, with their pinky fingers linked in great solemnity. At the time, nothing could be more pious and precious than the eternal, unconditional promise of one young soul to another.

But of course, children grow up. We adults are a little more cynical about these things. Amongst “grown-ups”, roughly one half of us who utter the solemn words “For better or worse, for richer or poorer…” don’t keep the promise. So much for “plight thee my troth”.

In commerce, more often than not, a promise is only calculated language made in the course of negotiations, to be kept, flaunted, or leveraged as advantage presents itself. Promises, the thinking goes, are for suckers.

In a perfect world we wouldn’t need lawyers. We would all make our promises intelligently, and we would keep them. But that’s not the way it is.

We lawyers have always made a good living litigating broken promises. I make no apologies for that– we’re just getting paid to clean up somebody’mess, and thank goodness we do. At the end of the day, our legal system is about enforcing promises and expectations. If, for example, you visit my home, you expect that I will take reasonable precautions for your safety, and if I fail to do so, I should be held accountable to some proportionate remedy.

It is the enforcement of promises which makes our lives livable and our dreams possible. I’d be happy to live in a world without lawyers, but that would require you, and me, and you, and you, and you, and all of us, to keep all of our promises.

Promises are the things which glue our society together. None of us have enough time or energy to be constantly looking over our shoulders. Our personal resources are finite. We need to be able to rely on one another to do what we said we would do. And if we don’t do this and can’t enforce this, society begins to crumble.

But keeping our promises is not primarily about society– it’s about ourselves. The most important reason we keep promises is the care of our own souls. We become what we say and what we do. At the end of the day we need to live with ourselves and our own reputations.

Pinky promises and “stick a needle in my eye” are children’s way of solemnizing the oaths they take. Regretfully, as we grow older, we become more casual about the promises we make to our spouses, our partners, our children, our clients and our communities, just when they need to rely on us more.

Perhaps Jesus had this in mind when he said, “Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.”