Love locks break bridges - and make me hate romance

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/10/love-locks-paris-bridges-romance-pont-des-arts

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Love can change the world. I know that may sound trite, but it's true. If enough people gather together in a universal display of love, things can really change. Obviously by "things" I mean "a 2.4m stretch of railing on a bridge", and by "change" I mean "dangerously buckle, thereby threatening the lives of hundreds of people", but you get my drift. Love knackers bridges, that's my point.

The news that the Pont des Arts in Paris has finally started to give way under the strain of thousands of padlocks isn't all that surprising. For five years, couples from around the world have flocked to the bridge in order to attach a padlock to its railings and then fling the key into the Seine. It's beautiful. The lock symbolises their love. The key symbolises their attitude to social responsibility.

But grand romantic gestures like that aren't really my thing. The potential for embarrassment is too enormous. There must be a couple somewhere that understands my point. After all, someone had to be the straw that broke the camel's back. I like to imagine that the last padlock to be placed on the Ponts des Arts belonged to a couple that went to Paris together. They might have even got engaged there.

"Darling," the man says after a candlelit meal, "we should mark this enchanted evening for ever." They find a padlock vendor, still unable to believe what a ridiculous markup he can bung on something you can buy from B&Q for £1.48. They write their initials on the padlock. They walk to the bridge hand-in-hand, oblivious to everything but their love for each another. He kneels down and delicately hooks the lock into the railing. He stands, and turns to face the love of his life. "Darling, I …" he begins before he's interrupted by a terrifying creaking noise. The bridge suddenly lurches to the left. Their stupid padlock has broken one of the most famous bridges in the world. It's all their fault. They run away and, spooked by this symbolic collapse, immediately break up. In time, they will die alone.

I'm assuming that this is what happened, anyway, because it's exactly what I imagine would happen to me if I ever tried to attach a love lock to anything. Well, not exactly – I'm so romantically inept that I'd probably also manage to hit a tourist boat as I threw the key into the river. A passenger on the boat. A child passenger. An orphan. In the eye. I'd basically blind an orphan 10 seconds before causing a bridge to fall on them is what I'm saying.

My past is littered with doomed romantic gestures like this, especially early on. My problem seemed to be that I'd somehow confused "romance" with "mad-eyed possessiveness". As a teenager, I went through a nasty period of buying those grotty double-pendants from Argos – those two halves of a broken heart that you spend a fiver on and then wear together for a month until your neck turns green. To me back then, they said: "We are two parts of the same whole." To me today, with the benefit of mortifying hindsight, they say: "Never leave me. I will chop your body up and keep it in my fridge for company if you ever leave me." Same thing goes with the beeper that I bought as a Valentine's gift. And the vast majority of mixtapes that I made. In fact, the same girl might have received the majority of these gifts. We're not together any more, funnily enough.

I've come to see love locks in the same light – desperate attempts at assigning permanence to a temporary coupling. Whenever I've walked down the Pont des Arts – or the Hohenzollernbrücke in Cologne or the Millennium Bridge in London or any of the other bridges that are slowly being taken over by romantic padlocks – my first instinct isn't to think, "Oh, how charming," but, "I wonder how many of these couples are actually still together?" Statistically, it can't be many. How many people around the world feel silly walking across bridges because there's a clump of metal with "Barry & Julie 4EVA" written on it, even though Julie has long since left Barry because a therapist identified him as the primary reason for her chronic alcoholism? Probably more than you'd dare to believe.

What's more, if the bridge is of any length at all, love locks can be tedious to the observer. For the first few metres it can be fun to stop and read the inscriptions on individual locks. Then, as you go on, the novelty gradually begins to wear off. "Yes, we get it, you're happy together, whoopty doo," you think at the halfway point. By the end of it, you hate love. That's what you do, people who put padlocks on the furthest end of bridges that I have to walk across – you make me hate love. Happy now?

I don't want to deny young couples the opportunity to make enthusiastically hamfisted attempts at marking their love, but, from both an emotional and structural perspective, it's clear that love locks aren't the way to go. Maybe instead of attaching a lock to a bridge, you could both get each other's face tattooed across the entirety of your back. You'll probably feel just as silly about it in years to come, but at least Parisians will be able to get to work without falling into a river.