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The author, a philosopher, addresses unpredictability from the current, increasingly unstable and unpredictable state of the world. In reaction to this, the quest for security, protection and predictability prevails. This change affects the bonds between people who, in a de-institutionalised society made of connections, take mutate into “projects”. For couples, we seem to have moved on from the traditional and indissoluble marriage to the couple as project, completely subordinated to private choices. We now seem to be leaving the modern moment of the free alliance behind us. This marriage as pact emerges from the emancipatory invention of divorce, with the opportunity it offers of breaking free of bonds. However, it also revolves around the acceptance of surprise, disappointment and mere good or bad luck. It is through the promise – a question that Ricœur, Austin and Arendt focused on in particular – that one turns towards ordinary unpredictability, not to so much to vouchsafe a form of security, but to cling to it and push out a fragile archipelago of words into an ocean of uncertainty.