If words were presidential candidates, promises would be Donald Trump:
A pompous, idiotic notion, hopelessly out of its depth, without a sensible reason for its own existence.
If promises were always kept, it wouldn’t have been necessary to make them.
A promise might denote a sincere intention as easily as hiding an insincere one.
Perhaps we’ll be better off, or at least less prone to disappointment, if we simply deleted this word.
Maybe at weddings people could say: At the moment I have every intention of not leaving you, not cheating on you and generally treating you well.
But since changing tradition often upsets people, let’s compromise by just deleting Donald Trump.