Today's Thursday • 8 mins read
Most people expect a narcissist to lie about the present. What catches people off guard is when the lies are about the future.
The narcissist’s promise for the future doesn’t come with any plans to make it happen.
Those words are just to keep the relationship going so they can keep getting what they want, whether it’s love, status, control, or anything else.
You rarely suspect it, as it never sounds like obvious manipulation. It shows up as hope and lets them trap you in a trauma bond.
What Future Faking Actually Looks Like
Psychology Today says future faking is when a narcissistic person talks about the future they dream of creating with their significant other, even if they have no real plans of bringing those dreams to life.
This is how Dr. Ramani Durvasula, a clinical psychologist, explains it:
“Future faking is trying to entice something from someone else on the basis of a future promise. Future faking is saying that promise will happen if the other person in the relationship just sticks around or does something.”
What makes this future faking particularly insidious is the timing. The delivery of the promise varies, but the function is consistent.
During the early stages, a narcissist may decide within weeks that you’re the perfect match and start mapping out a shared future in detail. The speed feels exhilarating. That’s by design.
The promises can be sweeping or surprisingly specific: celebrating milestones together, getting engaged, having children, or buying a home.
Even in the middle of a fight, a narcissist may offer a fake future, promising to help more, spend more quality time together, or never hurt you again. Most of the time, it stops the fight without them having to change themselves.
And then with the next argument come new promises, or the same ones in different wording.
This is the pattern: the promises keep coming, but the follow-through never does. That promised annual vacation in Paris never gets booked.
Every time you bring up those plans, there’s an excuse, a delay, or a punishment. You may be told things would be different if only you weren’t so “sensitive” or “difficult.”
As Dr. Ramani puts it, “Relationships with narcissists are held in place by hope of a ‘someday better,’ with little evidence to support it will ever arrive.”
Why Future Faking Works
Future faking is effective because it exploits something reasonable: the willingness to extend trust and wait for things to improve.
Over time, future faking produces a particular kind of self-sustaining hope in the person on the receiving end. This is what that looks like in long-term relationships: “It’s going to get better after the kids are grown, when he gets a promotion, when we retire.”
The narcissist may not even be making those specific promises anymore.
The victim is now generating the hope themselves, which is exactly where the narcissist needs them to be. That dynamic keeps people with narcissists.
The psychology here is documented. Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory (1957) helps us see why people stay.
When reality doesn’t match expectation, people experience psychological discomfort. And to overcome that unease, they may rationalize or deny what’s happening.
The narcissist’s partner hopes for a better future to explain away the harsh present.
Future faking operates through intermittent reinforcement, a core driver of trauma bonding.
So the narcissist makes promises but only occasionally fulfills a few of them. The rest are empty promises, creating disappointment. Together, they create a strong psychological attachment.
This is why smart, self-aware people can stay in these relationships even after identifying the pattern. Knowing it’s happening doesn’t automatically undo the bond.
Narcissists’ Sincere Belief In Future Faking
One of the more complicated aspects of future faking is that the narcissist often believes the promises as they’re making them.
Dr. Greg Kushnick, a psychologist who has spoken directly on the topic, addressed this:
“Many narcissists are very impulsive when it comes to having romantic feelings. And in that impulsivity, they promise someone the world. They actually believe what they’re saying to you to be true during the initial courting period. Until they don’t.”
There’s a basic reason for this. Early in a narcissistic relationship, the partner gets idealized and idolized. The narcissist genuinely believes they have found someone exceptional.
That partly explains why the promises feel so real in the moment.
Over time, as the partner inevitably proves to be a normal, imperfect person, that idealization collapses into devaluation.
The narcissist then uses that shift to justify the broken promises, telling themselves the partner no longer deserves what was offered. The fault, in their framing, always lands on you.
Dr. Elinor Greenberg, a Gestalt therapy trainer, points to something less obvious: Some narcissists future-fake partly because they’re poor conversationalists.
They rely on rehearsed stories and strategies that cast them in a good light, and elaborate future planning fills the space that genuine curiosity about another person would normally occupy.
Their promises often serve as a substitute for real intimacy. When those promises collapse, the rationalizations narcissists reach for are telling.
Drawing on her clinical work, Greenberg documents what narcissists actually say: “I meant it when I said it, it just didn’t work out between us. Why blame me?” or “He is not who I thought he was. He fooled me. I don’t owe him anything.” The accountability is always elsewhere (Greenberg, Psychology Today, 2021).
5 Ways To Recognize Future Faking In Real Time
- Promises to action ratio. The clearest sign of future-faking is a low ratio of promises to actions: promises/actions < 1, usually far less and often near zero. Keep a mental or written note of whether the person is really working toward the future they’re describing.
- Steps to the promised goal. A real commitment has steps behind it; future-faking has none. They are showing you a grand castle in the air that, if you look closely, has no stairs. Narcissists may believe that since it has worked before, it will work on you too.
- Promises appear at strategic moments. Right when you’re about to pull back, right after a fight, right when you’ve started asking harder questions. Future faking buys time, creates dependency by linking your dreams to the narcissist’s presence, and feeds their grandiosity. Making impressive promises costs them nothing.
- The promises are personally targeted. A narcissist who knows you want to move to another city, get married by a certain age, or finally feel emotionally secure will make promises in exactly those terms. The specificity makes it land harder, and makes the eventual disappointment harder to shake.
- Pressure mounts to pull back from other people. A future faker often wants to be the center of your world. So they’ll push you to spend less time with friends, skip family commitments, or deprioritize your career. The future they’re selling sounds expansive, but the life they’re actually building for you gets smaller. Cut off from your support network, you also lose the outside perspective that might otherwise help you see the pattern clearly.
The Long Game: When Future Faking Spans Decades
One version of future faking is the most damaging of all: the promise to grow old together.
Since society didn’t have a widely accessible language for narcissistic abuse until relatively recently, it means:
- Many people now in their 40s, 50s, and beyond might have spent decades in toxic relationships they couldn’t name or fully understand.
- They could still be waiting for the promised future, 40, 50, or even 60 years into their narcissistic marriages.
Then there is the financial cost, other than the emotional loss. When someone close promises a shared future, it’s rational to start investing in it.
People lend money to the narcissist, cover their bills, fund their education, or pivot their career for the promised dream life together.
When the future never arrives, monetary losses compound the grief. The money is gone, and so is the dream the relationship was supposed to build toward.
The caregiving years are where the promise of growing old together fully collapses. A narcissist who pledged to grow old alongside you will not show up the way they said when your health deteriorates.
Clinicians say this is what that looks like in practice:
- If the narcissist’s health declines first, you’ll spend those years caring for someone ungrateful and difficult.
- If your health declines first, which may be more likely because of the years of tolerating narcissistic abuse, you’ll be forced to depend on someone who sees your illness as an inconvenience.
That’s the full cost of the long game: years of broken promises, and a crueler version of the same narcissist standing next to you when things get hard.
Final Words
A repeated failure to follow through on promises is a personality red flag; they are showing who they are.
If, after every conflict, your partner promises to see a therapist but never goes, that gap tells the real story: they are saying they won’t change for you.
Wanting a real future with someone is reasonable, not a flaw. The narcissist’s scheme is to use that desire against you.
Don’t put your life on hold waiting for “someday” with a narcissistic partner; they may quietly view your forward momentum as a threat.
√ Also Read: How To Beat The Narcissist: 7 Strategies That Always Work
√ Please share this with someone.
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