Promises are like Babies: Easy to Make, Hard to Deliver.

We make promises all the time, some of us respect them more than others but we all break or have broken promises in the past because we are not perfect. Sometimes we can make promises that you know that we will not have to keep or make what sounds like a promise by adding a qualifier (e.g. 'could') or making the statement vague. It’s call making an empty promise. 

It makes me think of Do-Ho Suh’s work Screen, installation at the Lehmann Maupin, New York. It is a screen made out of different colored men and women, who look like a wall when you first see it but once you come closer, you distinguish the little army of people. This wall is not at all opaque, looks more like a solid piece of fabric than an actually wall as we can see the rest of the room through it. An empty promise is just like that wall, gives the illusion that it is real but when you come closer you realize there is no intension of keeping it, it was just to impress and there wasn’t anything real there. One might question if an empty promise isn’t simply a disguised lie, or just a lack of respect for the other person.

Some of his other work.

An empty promise is one sided and means that the other person is left with a particular expectation in their head, so they will ultimately disappointed. Therefore an empty promise is a promise that is broken from the start.