The Future-Faker
Big plans out loud ('we should go to...'), zero follow-through.
The Future-Faker doesn't dodge the future — he narrates it. The trip you should take, the restaurant he's dying to show you, what you'll do next summer. It's intoxicating, because it sounds like intention. Then the week arrives and none of it exists.
Future-faking works because it pays you in anticipation, which feels like progress but costs him nothing. The relationship keeps happening in a tense that never arrives.
The signs
- ·The plans are vivid and dateless. Destinations, details, zero calendars. The specificity is the trap — it sounds too detailed to be fake.
- ·Enthusiasm spikes, then the subject changes. Bring up the trip he pitched last week and watch it evaporate: 'oh yeah totally, we should.'
- ·The future grows while the present shrinks. Bigger and bigger someday-plans, fewer and fewer actual Tuesdays.
- ·You've started editing your own schedule around ghosts. Holding weekends for plans that were never actually made.
His texts, translated
“i'm taking you to this amazing place in lisbon someday”
Lisbon is safe precisely because it's far away. Watch what he does with next Friday — that's the real itinerary.
“next weekend for sure”
The third 'for sure' is a genre, not a plan. A plan survives being asked 'what day?'
The play
You don't argue with a future-faker — you invoice him. Quietly move from promises to receipts:
- ·Count kept plans, not pitched ones. His score is dinners that happened. Everything else is content.
- ·Call one plan due. 'Lisbon's ambitious — how about tacos Thursday?' The reaction to a small, near, concrete plan tells you everything.
- ·Stop paying in anticipation. No more holding weekends. Your calendar responds to booked things.
Future-faking plus intensity can shade into The Love Bomber; future-faking plus cancellations is The Chronic Rescheduler. Either way, the framework in Should I Reply to His Text? helps.