No Love Locks campaign wants to ban bridge locks

Did you know that the bridges in Paris are heaving under the weight of locks left on their fences by passing lovers? Neither did I. I also didn't realize that what I thought of as nothing more than a sweet and innocent symbol of young love, sadly rendered quite ironic by the fact that these promises of forever are routinely chopped and discarded, would represent to others (note: they're American) a pressing threat to the city's integrity.

Only a few years ago, I was one of those couples who put a silly lock on the Pont des Arts. In typical teenage-couple-stumbles-through-Paris fashion, my then boyfriend and I had bought an overpriced lock at a neighboring hardware store, forgot to bring a carving utensil and ended up sitting at a nearby café, scraping enough ink out of a pen to mark our initials. To be honest, the emotions most salient to me now are those of hunger, fatigue and cold. But on that winter day a few years ago, we checked something off our silly bucket list and left a temporary mark the Parisian scenery.

I hope couples will have this opportunity for decades to come and that the No Love Locks campaign won't succeed in banning this tradition, thereby making illegal one of the last innocent gestures of young love that I can think of. These locks obviously should not be protected at the expense of Paris' infrastructure, and it would break my heart to see bridges crumble after hundreds of years of history. But why can't the locks be cut more often so that fewer hang on bridges at any given time, for example? It won't really matter to the couples if their lock is gone a few days later, and to be honest it's impossible to find yours in the sea of locks if you only just briefly look away. What matters is that at some point in their lives a couple was together in Paris, and put a lock on a bridge. And I never want to see those memories banned.

For the full article on the No Love Locks campaign, visit The Guardian website.