Abstract

Since Plato’s Symposium, romantic, sexual love has been characterized as a movement in desire that seeks wholeness and identity since it is, at heart, broken.1 The yearning for sexual consummation is predicated upon the idea that love completes the self. Copulation provides lovers with a moment of rapture, relief, and oneness, but once satisfied it is again wanting in reawakening the desire to pledge and to make love again. Love operates much like a promise whose constant and insistent offerings seek to recover again and again its inherent brokenness. The promise of love and the many promises of love are divided further by the dual possibility of being fulfilled or unfulfilled, sincere or insincere, true or false...