Future faking or real plans? How to tell

Future faking means describing a shared future, trips, moving in, meeting family, that the person doesn’t actually intend to build. It’s different from honest enthusiasm, which comes with small steps that happen. The most reliable test is simple: watch what follows the words. Real plans grow smaller and more specific over time. Faked ones stay large and vague.

What is future faking?

The term comes from popular psychology, not from a body of research. A 2024 Psychology Today piece describes it as luring someone with a picture of a wonderful shared future, often one the person doesn’t believe in, to get something from them now: attention, loyalty, patience with bad behavior.1 The writer calls it a form of love bombing, meaning an early flood of affection used to win trust quickly.1

The same piece draws a useful line. Someone who sincerely describes a future that’s too ambitious, without thinking it through, is not future faking.1 Overexcited is not the same as dishonest.

That distinction matters, because most future talk is sincere.

Isn’t talking about the future a good sign?

Usually, yes. Here’s the part most people find surprising: “we” talk tends to track real commitment.

In 1998, psychologist Christopher Agnew and colleagues ran a survey and a two-wave study of people in romantic relationships. Those more committed to their partner used more plural pronouns, like “we” and “us,” without being prompted.2 They also felt more united with their partner and saw the relationship as more central to their lives.2 Over time, commitment and that “we” thinking fed each other.2

In plain terms: when someone weaves you into their future in conversation, it often reflects how they actually see you. Future talk is not a red flag on its own.

So how do you tell the difference?

Look at what happens between the big statements.

Consider Tobias and Marguerite. Four weeks in, Tobias was talking about a summer trip to Portugal and how much his mother would love her. By week ten, neither had come any closer. He hadn’t checked a single date. The mother lived twenty minutes away. When Marguerite suggested a Sunday lunch, he said “soon.”

• What happened: a lot of future talk, and no small steps toward any of it.
• The reading: “He’s stringing me along.”
• The fear: that she’s been taken in again.
• The next step: offer one small, specific step and see what he does with it.

The reading might be right. It might also be a person who loves to dream out loud and is slower to act. The next step is what separates them.

Translated into what you can actually see:

• Specificity over time. Real plans pick up dates, places and logistics. Faked ones stay “someday.”
• Small before large. Meeting a friend for coffee tends to come before meeting the parents at a holiday.
• Repair. When plans fall through, someone invested reschedules.
• Consistency. The person in the stories about next year looks like the person showing up this week.

What if it’s a pattern?

If big promises keep arriving and evaporating, especially when you start to pull back, it may be part of a wider cycle. Our pieces on love bombing versus genuine interest and on hot and cold dating go deeper.

If you notice you keep falling for the vision more than the person, that’s worth looking at too. Not as a flaw. A good story about the future is easy to want.

What doesn’t the research show?

• Future faking has no established research definition. The first source is an essay in Psychology Today, not a study.1
• Agnew’s work shows “we” talk tends to go with commitment, on average. It can’t say whether any one person means it.2
• Neither source measured how often future talk turns out false.
• Tobias and Marguerite are illustrative, not real.
• The sorting game is a reading aid, not a test.