Couples in Love Are Ruining the City of Love

Posted on 2025-04-03

When I traveled abroad to Paris during college, I admit that I felt swept up in the romance of the city.

I marveled over the couples that swarmed the city of love, gaping even a little at the ahem, openness, of the French people in displaying their affection for each other on sidewalks, benches, and pressed up longingly against bridge walls. I swooned over the love letters that I would write to my then-boyfriend, whom I’m sure, was puzzled when he received the love-swept passages.

So yes, while it can’t be denied that Paris is, in fact, a city for lovers, it apparently is also getting a new reputation.

A city for lovers to trash.

The tradition goes a little something like this:

Lovers, enamored with the romance that will most certainly sweep them off their feet for all of time, scratch their initials (or purchase a rather expensive inscribed version) onto a lock, fasten it on a “love bridge” along the Seine River, and forever throw away the key into the shining waters of Paris — love evermore, with no option to go back, well, because the key is gone. They’re dubbed “love locks” and they are filling up the bridges of Paris as eternal symbols of love.

A Paris travel website details that there are two main bridges in the city dedicated to keeping the flame going for the lovers that cross — the Pont des Arts, set aside for ”committed love,” while the Pont de l’Archevêché is for a lover. Can you guess which one has more locks?

And while the sentiment certainly seems a grand gesture, there is, as there always is, another side to this romantic love story — the fact that the locks are a major eye sore and sort of a public nuisance.

In fact, two American friends, Lisa Anselmo and Lisa Taylor Huf, now residents of Paris, recently founded a campaign called “No Love Locks” to end the tradition in Paris, because they, along with Parisian residents, have become “increasingly concerned” about the damage being caused to the bridges from the hundreds of heavy locks that line the bridges of the Seine River. You can even join over 5,660 fellow anti-love lock protesters by signing their online petition to ban the pesky locks, now estimated to number in the 700,000 range.

Honestly, while I can appreciate a romantic gesture as much as the next woman, I have to say that I’m not too keen on the idea of a tourist trap taking over the true romance of Paris. Not that I’m exactly a Parisian, but say I happen to be daydreaming about strolling alone the Siene with my love (my husband, obviously), I’m not so sure I want the vision marred by hundreds of rusty old locks threatening to crumble the very bridge upon which we are practicing our French make-out skills.

What do you think? Should the tradition stand? Or should lovers find a less public way to express their eternal love?