On Hohenzollernbrücke bridge in Cologne, Germany a tradition started in 2008 where lovers would mark their names on a padlock that they would affix on the bridge and throw away the key into the Rhine river that flowed below it.

I had visited the bridge with one of my Hostel roommates, Cora. She was a Chinese student from London who was on vacation in Germany. She was nice enough to have taken the feature photograph of this article.

This seems to be a trend that has been sprouting out all over the Europe lately. A few days later, I saw a similar bridge in Paris a few hours before a portion it collapsed under the weight of all the locks, and a few in various places all over Italy. I’ve heard that there have been some there were found in London and Edinburgh as well.

It was remarkable that there were so many locks written on by so many different languages of thousands of couples side by side. Through the centuries, people have always been searching for ways to immortalize their affections so strong that they wrote poems, books or songs, created sculptures, or choreographed dances. Many great rulers had even build great monuments to attest to their love as the case of the famous Taj Mahal. Perhaps, the lovers that had left their locks here had felt the same way.

Every nook of the bridge was literally covered in almost every lock imaginable. Some were handwritten, others engraved, and quite a few of them embossed.  I had never seen many padlocks all together in one place my whole life. Most of the people who had left their locks probably left them with the intention of returning to them again one day.

Part of me wanted to put one for me and my boyfriend, but I realized that some travel experiences were much better shared. It didn’t seem right to affix a lock and make a promise to stay together with someone all by myself. It also made me wonder what happened to the padlocks of those who had separated.

Initially, I had thought that people would put the date of when they had locked their padlocks on bridge, but apparently some people put days older than the year the first padlocked was placed. It then made it a little more beautiful to me. I initially thought that the only people crazy enough to participate in things like these were the young. Apparently, even the older couples who have been together for almost half a century played a role in creating this new tradition as well.

While I don’t really know how long this bridge will still exist, especially after what happened to the one in Paris and the public awareness that it might compromise its structural integrity, I do know that I was very lucky to have seen it first hand.

Even if they were to take the locks, and ban the people from putting new one’s up, one thing is for sure. Their stories and their promise of unending love would be forever remembered through the keys they’ve left on the bottom of the Rhine River.