Future faking

Future faking is promising a shared future (trips, moving in, meeting the family) to get something now: sex, money, patience, or that you stay. Big early talk is not the tell, because excited people talk big too. The tell is what the promise asks of you now, and whether anything near it has a date.

Updated October 5, 2026

Means

Promising a future to get something now

First seen

2009 (Natalie Lue, Baggage Reclaim, December 21, 2009, the earliest dated use we found); narcissism framing in blogs from 2015; quoted in the press by psychologist Ramani Durvasula from 2020

Related terms

Love bombing, Breadcrumbing, Red flags, Situationship, Talking stage, DTR (define the relationship)

Future faking means promising someone a shared future to get something from them now. The holiday, the move and the family dinner stay in the future. The request lands today. Of the ranking pages we read on October 5, 2026, most treat it as a diagnosis. This one looks at the behavior, because plenty of people talk big early and mean it. The table below puts a plan, enthusiasm and future faking side by side.

Signs and examples of future faking

The size of the promise tells you little. What it is attached to tells you more. The signs below are our reading of the dated posts and forum threads, not a validated checklist, and they are the same whoever is doing it.

• The far plan is vivid, the near one is vague. You know which beach, but not which evening this week.
• The near step keeps moving. Dinner slides to next week, then to after the big project, while the summer trip stays fully planned in conversation.
• The future comes with a request. Stay over, lend money, delete the app, wait a little longer. The promise and the ask arrive in the same message.
• A question about now gets an answer about later. You ask where this is going this month and hear about the house you will share one day.
• The promise comes back when you step back. Raise a problem or start to leave, and the plans return, bigger than before.

Each line below is one of ours, not tested at scale, and each could be sincere.

• First chat on an app: “I can already tell my mom is going to love you.”
• Week six, after the third reschedule: “Once things calm down at work, we’ll do a proper trip.”
• After date two: “Delete the app, I’m not going anywhere.”
• A few months in: “Lend me the deposit and the place is ours by spring.”
• Any time at all: “We’ll be exclusive as soon as I sort a few things out.”

The first line can be nerves and hope. Lines three and four ask for something now and put the payoff later, and line five asks for patience.

Talk about a shared future before you have met more than once or twice is already on our list of talking stage red flags. The forums see the same early version. On Mumsnet, a British parenting forum, a thread started June 14, 2021, with about 27 replies, asked about two app matches who brought up summer plans and trips before the first chat was over, and the replies read it more as eagerness than future faking (Mumsnet, June 2021). In another thread, started August 26, 2025, with about 45 replies, a poster described declarations of love and talk of the future in the first months, then a pull-back, and one reply named love bombing and future faking together (Mumsnet, August 2025).

Future faking vs enthusiasm vs love bombing

The same kind of sentence can be a plan, a wish or a trade. The table is one of ours, not tested at scale. Start with the column about what it asks of you now.

Enthusiasm asks for nothing, so it costs little even when Lisbon never happens. A light hint at doing something together is part of ordinary flirting over text. Future faking is the row where the far plan is doing a job today.

Sincere people overpromise too. Psychologists call the habit of underestimating how long your own plans will take the planning fallacy (Buehler et al., 1994), and a trip that never happened can be exactly that. People who make plans with a when and a where reach their goals more often than people with only a general intention, across 94 tests pooled in 2006 (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). Both lines of research are about people’s own goals, not about reading anyone else’s sincerity.

Company data points the same way, with caveats. Tawkify, a matchmaking company, surveyed 1,023 people who are currently dating, online in April 2026, with an average age of 38 (Tawkify, 2026). In the company’s own figures, 40% said they had used future-oriented language before they were sure about the relationship. It defines future faking as “the practice of making premature promises about a shared future in order to secure emotional investment in the present,” but it does not publish the questions or name a country. Our reading: a lot of people have done some version of this themselves.

Love bombing is the whole flood of early attention, praise and contact. Future faking is the promise-shaped part of it. It can arrive inside the flood, which is how the replies in the August 2025 thread read it, or on its own, months in, with no flood around it.

Breadcrumbing runs the other way. A breadcrumber never produces a plan. A future faker often produces a vivid one, far away, while the near ones slip. Both leave you waiting. The study on the breadcrumbing page did not measure future faking.

Why people do it, and where the term comes from

The earliest dated use we found is on Baggage Reclaim, Natalie Lue’s dating blog, in a post from December 21, 2009. She names the term herself: “Faking a future with you or, as I call it, Future Faking, is when someone intimates or promises a future to get what they want in the present” (Lue, 2009). The reasons she gives are ordinary ones. The short glosses are ours.

• Immediate gratification. The future is the price of something wanted tonight.
• Avoiding conflict. A promise ends an awkward conversation faster than an honest answer.
• Mistaking intensity for intimacy. Strong feelings in week two get read as a long-term plan.
• Fear of rejection. “I’m not sure yet” risks losing the person, so the future gets oversold.

These are explanations, not findings, and we found no study that tests them. A later post on the same blog is titled “Future Faking is partly about using intentions to enhance self-image” (Baggage Reclaim, 2014). Our reading of that title: part of the promise may be for the speaker’s picture of themselves.

Courtship research gives the background. People find deception about commitment upsetting (Haselton et al., 2005), and who says “I love you” first, and when, changes how it is heard (Ackerman et al., 2011). Our view: commitment talk carries weight early, which makes it easy to overspend. None of these studies says anyone does it on purpose.

Not every broken promise was a fake one. In a Mumsnet thread started May 12, 2025, with about 170 replies, about a promise that was never kept, some replies argued that a change of heart is not future faking. One put it plainly: “you can never, ever guarantee your future mindset” (Mumsnet, May 2025).

The earliest narcissism-framed use we found is a post by Zari L. Ballard on her Goodreads author blog, January 10, 2015 (Ballard, 2015). That has been the framing on blogs since, and the ranking pages we read follow it. Wiktionary’s entry defines it only that way, as a strategy to lure somebody into a long-term relationship (Wiktionary).

Lue kept writing about it, including a 2012 post titled “Future Faking Is Like The Emperor’s New Clothes” (Lue, 2012), and the British forums picked it up from her. In a Mumsnet thread started August 15, 2016, with about 25 replies, a reply on August 17 linked her 2009 post: “This is a v good post from the Baggage Reclaim website” (Mumsnet, August 2016).

Psychologist Ramani Durvasula is quoted on the term in the press. The earliest dated press use we found is August 3, 2020, when BroBible quoted her from a Men’s Health piece (BroBible, 2020). A 2023 version of that piece quotes her: “It’s kind of a psychological Ponzi scheme, in which you buy in now, and never get paid down the road” (Men’s Health via AOL, 2023). Several pages say she named it. The dated uses we found are older.

Urban Dictionary has one definition, posted August 6, 2021, in a gentler sense: “When you’re drunk with your friends and enthusiastically make plans for some time in the future that you’ll never follow through with” (Urban Dictionary, 2021). Many of us have done that one. Nobody asked for a deposit.

What to do about it

Future talk is not a bad sign in itself. In the research on our situationship page, talking about the future was among the things that went with more satisfaction and commitment. Nobody needs to stop dreaming out loud. The steps below check whether the dream comes with a calendar.

1. Check two things. Our rule of thumb, with no study behind it: what this future asks of you now, and what the nearest step is and whether it has a date. If the answers are “nothing” and “Saturday,” there is little to check. Where things stand now is a separate conversation, and our DTR page covers it.
2. Ask for the nearest step. One of ours, not tested at scale: “I like the sound of Lisbon. I’d like to start with a walk on Saturday.” It takes the dream seriously and moves the conversation to this week.
3. Do not pay now for later. No loan, no move, no extra season of waiting on a promise alone. One of ours, not tested at scale: “Let’s get through a few ordinary weeks before we plan a summer.”
4. Allow for honest misses. Our view: a plan that moves once, with a new date, is a schedule. One that keeps moving with no new date has usually stopped being a plan. People are optimistic about their own calendars, so judge the pattern, not one cancellation.
5. Stop arranging your weeks around the far plan. If the near step keeps slipping, drop the far one too. If the future you keep replaying is one you mostly built yourself, our delulu page covers one experiment in which rosy fantasies about a future went with less energy. Lines for ending things are in how to end a situationship.
6. If money or control comes into it, get help first. If you feel pressured over money, afraid or controlled, the last step on our red flags page lists helplines in the US and the UK.

What the research says

The research sits next to the term rather than on it.

Haselton, Buss, Oubaid and Angleitner ran three studies, with 217 participants in the US, 200 in Germany and 479 in the US. They measured how upset people were by deception about resources, commitment and sex (Haselton et al., 2005). Deception about commitment is the nearest category to future faking. The studies show that it upsets people. They do not show how often it happens.

Ackerman, Griskevicius and Li ran six studies on confessions of love. Who said it first, and whether the couple had already had sex, changed how a confession was received (Ackerman et al., 2011).

On dating apps, most of the chat looks honest. Markowitz and Hancock found that about 7% of the more than 3,000 messages in their study were deceptive (Markowitz & Hancock, 2018; the message count comes from Stanford’s account). That account, published by Futurity on May 1, 2018, describes more than 200 app users. It says nearly two-thirds of participants reported telling no lies, and about 30% of the deceptions were butler lies, small excuses that manage availability and contact (Stanford via Futurity, 2018). Our reading: a common small lie in app chat is about tonight, not next summer.

Buehler, Griffin and Ross found that people’s predictions of when they would finish their own tasks were too optimistic across tasks, because they focused on how the plan would go rather than on past experience (Buehler et al., 1994). Gollwitzer and Sheeran pooled 94 independent tests and found a medium-to-large effect, d = .65, of plans with a when and a where on reaching goals (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). Both are about people’s own plans. Neither can tell you whether a date means what they say.

We read the abstracts, and Stanford’s summary for the app study, not the full papers. None of these studies looked at future faking by name, and we found no study that did. What they offer is context: deception about commitment upsets people, most app chat is honest, and sincere plans slip too.