Future Faking: Why They Promise a Future They Never Intend to Give You

Future faking is when someone pays you in promises instead of actions. They describe the life you will have together in detail. The move, the trip, the ring, the kids. And then nothing happens. No dates, no bookings, no steps. Here is why that works on you, and how to stop letting it.

Let me be direct about something. If you are reading this, you probably already know. You are not looking for information. You are looking for permission to trust what you have noticed. Consider it given.

What Is Future Faking?

It is simple to describe and hard to see while it is happening. Someone talks about a shared future in a way that feels like commitment, without ever taking a step toward it.

The key thing is what the talk replaces. In a healthy relationship, talking about the future is the first part of doing something. You discuss the trip, then you look at dates, then you book it. The conversation leads somewhere.

In future faking, the conversation is the destination. It is not step one of five. It is the whole product, delivered and paid for, and you leave the conversation feeling like something happened. Nothing happened. You just feel like it did.

The timing is the tell. Notice when the big talk arrives. It is rarely on a quiet Sunday. It usually shows up after a bad week, after you got fed up, or after you said something like this cannot go on. The promise appears exactly when your patience runs out, and it buys another few months.

Why Does a Promise Work So Well on You?

Three reasons, and none of them are that you are gullible.

It rescues your investment. You have put time in. Maybe years. The promise means all of that was heading somewhere after all. Walking away means the time was wasted. Staying means it counted. Of course you want the second one.

It flatters you. Being told you are the person someone wants a whole life with is a strong feeling. Doubting the promise starts to feel like doubting yourself, or like being cynical about something beautiful. So you take it at face value and feel bad for even wondering.

It arrives when hope is lowest. This is the mechanical part. A promise delivered at the moment you are ready to leave does not just make you happy. It resets the clock. You go from nearly out to giving it another six months, in one conversation.

That last point connects to something bigger. When good things arrive rarely and at unpredictable moments, they hook you harder than steady treatment does. Our guide on intermittent reinforcement covers why that is, and future faking is one of the cleanest examples of it in the wild.

Why Does the Promise Feel Better Than the Thing Itself?

Here is something that sounds strange until you have lived it. The conversation about the house can feel better than a house would. That is not a personality defect. It is how the reward system is built.

Kent Berridge and Terry Robinson at the University of Michigan spent decades pulling apart two things everyone else had lumped together. They call them wanting and liking, and they run on different machinery. Wanting is the pull, the anticipation, the lean forward, and it is driven hard by mesolimbic dopamine. Liking is the actual pleasure of getting the thing, and it runs on a much smaller and more fragile opioid system that does not depend on dopamine at all. Their 2016 paper in American Psychologist lays out the case, and the headline finding is blunt. Wanting can happen without liking. The chase and the payoff are separate systems, and only one of them is loud.

Now apply that to a Tuesday night conversation about the wedding you are going to have. The description does the dopamine work. You get the pull, the vividness, the forward lean. And crucially, none of it requires anything to actually happen. The wanting system has been fed a full meal on zero calories.

Which is why the pattern can run for years without collapsing under its own weight. A relationship built on real steps gives you liking, and liking is quieter. A relationship built on promises gives you wanting, over and over, and wanting is the louder signal. You are not confused about which one you have. You are being paid in the currency your brain reacts to most strongly.

There is a second piece too. Following through on any intention is genuinely hard, and it hinges on how connected someone feels to the version of themselves who has to do the work. Benjamin Ganschow and colleagues tested this with 90 participants in a 2024 PLOS One study, indexed on PubMed Central, running people through role play exercises with their own future self. Feeling connected to that future self predicted actually doing the thing, at an odds ratio of 2.21. Of the people who started their intended behaviour, 73 percent kept going.

Read that from the other direction. Someone who is not connected to their future self can describe that future in gorgeous detail and feel almost nothing pulling them toward the work of building it. The person selling you the picture and the person who would have to book the flights barely know each other.

There is a third piece, and it is the one that stings. Vividly imagining a good future does not just fail to help. It quietly drains the fuel you would need to go and build it. Gabriele Oettingen and Bettina Schworer set this out in Frontiers in Psychology in 2013, available on PubMed Central, and their summary of the evidence is blunt. The more positive someone's fantasies about the future, the less successful they are at actually realising them. In Oettingen and Mayer's 2002 study, patients recovering from hip replacement surgery who fantasised most positively about getting better were rated by their own physical therapists as recovering worse two weeks later. And in the lab, inducing positive fantasies produced lower energisation and lower effort than questioning fantasies, negative fantasies, or plain factual thinking did.

The reason is almost too tidy. A positive fantasy lets you enjoy the success now, in advance, for free. Once you have already had the feeling, the part of you that would have gone out and earned it has nothing left to push against. So when someone walks you through the house and the garden and the dog for an hour on a Sunday, they are not building momentum toward any of it. They are spending it. That is worth sitting with, because it means the loveliest conversations you have had about your future together may be the exact reason none of it arrived.

What Does Future Faking Sound Like?

It sounds lovely. That is the problem. Here are the common shapes.

• "When things calm down at work, we will go away properly." Things have never once calmed down.
• "I want to marry you." Said with feeling, twice a year, for four years, with no ring and no date.
• "I just need to sort a few things out first." The list of things is never written down and never gets shorter.
• "You would love my family, I cannot wait for you to meet them." Two years in, you have not met them.
• "Next year is our year." This is the fourth next year.
• "I know I have been bad at this, that is going to change." Said after every serious argument, and never followed by a change.

Now try a test. Take the biggest promise you have been given. Ask yourself one question. What actually happened in the seven days after it was made?

If the honest answer is nothing, you have your data. Not their intentions. Not their tone. Just the week that followed.

Are They Lying, or Do They Mean It at the Time?

This is the question people get stuck on for years, so here is a straight answer. Both happen, and you often cannot tell which one you are dealing with.

Some people mean every word as they say it. In that moment they can see the house and feel the feeling. The problem is that the feeling does the job that action should do. They get the warm glow of being a committed partner without doing anything, and by Tuesday it has faded. They are not keeping score, so they do not notice the promise has expired. You are keeping score, so you do.

And there is good evidence that sincere intentions predict very little on their own. Conner and Norman, writing in Frontiers in Psychology in 2022 and indexed on PubMed Central, summarise decades of work on what psychologists call the intention behaviour gap. Citing Sheeran's 2002 review, they report that 54 percent of people who formed a positive intention to act never acted on it. Webb and Sheeran's meta-analysis found that a medium to large shift in someone's intentions produced only a small to medium shift in their behaviour, an effect size of d = 0.36. That is the ordinary human failure rate on things people genuinely mean. It is worth knowing before you treat a heartfelt promise as evidence.

Some people do it knowingly. Research on narcissism and romantic relationships helps explain how the two versions can look identical from the outside. Wurst, Back and colleagues published seven studies covering 3,560 participants in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, indexed on PubMed, and they separated narcissism into two parts. One draws people in through charm and admiration seeking, and it performs very well early on. The other pushes people away over time. That split explains a real pattern. The same person can be extraordinary at starting a relationship and unable to sustain one.

There is direct work on lying too, and the result is more interesting than you would expect. Harhoff and colleagues ran two studies, with 298 and 256 participants, published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2023 and available via PubMed Central. Narcissism predicted how good people believed they were at lying, at r = 0.25 and r = 0.24. It did not predict how much they actually lied to their partners. The authors concluded that narcissism "promotes confidence in one's own lying abilities, which are then, however, not exploited within the own romantic relationship." So the person selling you a future may not think of it as lying at all. They just think they are convincing.

But here is the part worth holding onto. It does not matter much which one you have. A promise that never lands costs you the same year of your life either way. Sincerity is not a currency you can spend.

And if the warmth at the start was overwhelming, then cooled fast, our guide on covert narcissism may fit better than you would like.

Could It Be Avoidance Rather Than Manipulation?

Sometimes, yes. This section exists because the internet is very quick to hand you the word narcissist, and a wrong diagnosis costs you either way.

There's a version of this that isn't strategy at all. Some people say yes to a future because saying anything else in that moment feels unbearable. Disappointing you now is concrete and immediate. Failing to deliver in eight months is abstract and far away. So the promise is a way of getting through Tuesday evening, not a plan to control you.

Recall the intention behaviour numbers from earlier. Fifty four percent of people who form a genuine intention never act on it, and shifting someone's intentions moves their behaviour only slightly. That is the ordinary human baseline, and it applies to people who love you and mean it.

You can usually tell the two apart, and the difference shows up in what happens when you name it calmly.

• Avoidance looks embarrassed. Bring up the pattern gently and you get discomfort, maybe shame, sometimes an honest "I know, I keep doing this." There's a person in there who dislikes it too.
• Strategy looks annoyed. The same gentle question produces irritation, a reversal, or a sudden much bigger promise. The response manages you rather than engages you.
• Avoidance improves with structure. Ask for something small and dated, and an avoidant person will often manage it once the vagueness is removed, because vagueness was the problem.
• Strategy resists structure. Specificity is the enemy, so requests for dates get reframed as pressure no matter how kindly you put them.
• Avoidance is consistent across areas. They dodge the dentist and the tax return too. If the only thing they cannot commit to is you, that is a different pattern.

That last one does a lot of work. Broad avoidance is a trait. Targeted avoidance is a choice.

Here's the uncomfortable part though. Knowing which one you have changes how you feel about them. It does not change what you should do about the years. A partner who is genuinely conflicted and never changes costs you the same decade as one who is calculating, and you cannot fix the first kind by understanding them harder. Our guide on emotional immaturity covers the version that isn't malicious and still doesn't work.

So use this section for accuracy, not for hope. Being fair about someone's motives is worth doing. It's just not the same as waiting to see whether fairness will be rewarded.

What Happens in the Brain When a Promise Breaks?

This is the part that surprised me most, and it changes how you should think about the question of whether they knew.

Thomas Baumgartner, Urs Fischbacher, Anja Feierabend, Kai Lutz and Ernst Fehr ran a study published in Neuron in 2009 called The Neural Circuitry of a Broken Promise. They put people in a scanner and walked them through three stages. First you make a promise. Then you sit with the knowledge that your partner is relying on it. Then you choose whether to keep it or break it.

Two findings matter for you. The first is that breaking a promise lit up the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex and the amygdala. In plain terms, that is conflict and emotional load. Breaking the promise was not effortless for these people. Something in there was fighting it.

The second finding is the one worth writing down. A specific pattern of activity in the anterior insula, anterior cingulate and inferior frontal gyrus, measured back at the promise and anticipation stages, predicted who would go on to break it. The signal was there before the betrayal. The researchers concluded that brain measurements can reveal malevolent intentions before the dishonest act is committed.

So at least some of the time, something knows. Not necessarily a clean conscious thought of I am lying right now, but a live conflict running underneath while the lovely words come out. That fits the thing people describe again and again after these relationships end. There was a flicker. A half second where the delivery was slightly too smooth or the eye contact was slightly off. You noticed it, decided you were being paranoid, and carried on.

You were not being paranoid. You just had no way to prove it, and you had every reason to want the promise to be real.

Worth being careful here, though. This does not mean you can scan a partner over dinner and get an answer, and it does not turn a gut feeling into evidence. It means the flicker you noticed was probably real information. Enough to pay attention. Not enough to argue with, which is exactly why arguing about intentions is a trap. If someone keeps rewriting what you saw and felt until you stop trusting your own read, that has its own name, and our guide on gaslighting covers it.

How Do You Tell a Real Plan From a Sold One?

Plans do fall through. People lose jobs and get sick and run out of money. That is not what this is. Here is how to tell them apart.

• A real plan has a date. Even a rough one. Future faking stays in the season of soon.
• A real plan leaves a trail. A search history, a saved link, a message to someone else about it. Faking leaves nothing behind.
• A real plan gets mentioned again by them. This is the strongest test. If you are the only person who ever brings it up, it was never a plan.
• A real plan that fails gets discussed. There is an apology and an attempt to reschedule. A faked one just quietly disappears.
• A real plan survives a boring week. Faked ones only appear during high emotion, after conflict or during a good stretch.
• A real plan can handle a question. Ask when, and you get an answer. Ask a future faker when, and you get told you are pressuring them.

That last reaction is worth sitting with. If asking for a date makes you the difficult one, the promise was never for you. It was for them.

Does Future Faking Only Happen in Relationships?

No. Romance is where it hurts most, but the mechanism works anywhere someone has something you want and the power to keep dangling it.

Work is the obvious one. The promotion that's coming after this quarter. The pay review that keeps slipping. The title change that gets discussed in every one to one and never appears in writing. Organisational researchers have a name for the gap between what you were led to expect and what you got. They call it psychological contract breach, and it has been studied properly.

Gabriela Topa, Mercedes Aranda-Carmena and Berta De-Maria reviewed that literature in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in 2022, available through PubMed Central, pulling together the effect sizes from Zhao and colleagues' meta-analysis. Breach correlated with organisational trust at r = -0.53, job satisfaction at r = -0.45, turnover intention at r = 0.34, and organisational commitment at r = -0.32.

Now look at the last number in that set. Actual turnover came in at r = 0.05. Close to nothing.

Sit with the shape of that. Broken promises destroy trust, tank satisfaction, and make people want to leave. They barely move whether people actually go. Wanting out and getting out turn out to be almost unrelated, and that is the entire economics of future faking in one line. The person doing it can break promise after promise and still keep you, because the thing that collapses is your morale rather than your presence.

It runs in families too, usually around money or approval. The inheritance that gets mentioned whenever you consider moving away. The parent who is going to apologise properly one day, and who reliably brings that up when you pull back. The support that's always available next year, when things are less hectic.

And it happens in friendships, quietly. The friend who always talks about the trip you're going to take, and who never once opens a calendar. That version is less damaging because less is riding on it, but it teaches you the same bad lesson: that enthusiasm and intention are the same thing.

The tests from earlier in this article port across without much modification. Is there a date. Does the other person bring it up unprompted. Does asking a direct question about timing get an answer or get you called impatient. At work you have one advantage you do not have at home, which is that you can ask for things in writing without it being a hostile act. If a manager will not put a promised promotion into an email, you have your answer, and you did not have to accuse anybody of anything to get it. Our guide on quiet firing covers what it looks like when the stalling has a purpose behind it.

How Is Future Faking Different From Love Bombing and Breadcrumbing?

These three get bundled together online, and they're genuinely different mechanisms. Telling them apart tells you what stage you're at.

Love bombing is about intensity, and it lives at the beginning. Overwhelming attention, speed, certainty. The currency is volume, and the effect is to move things faster than your judgement can keep up with. It works by flooding you.

Breadcrumbing is about scarcity, and it lives in the long middle. Just enough contact to keep you in orbit and not enough to constitute a relationship. The currency is minimum viable attention. It works by rationing you.

Future faking is about time. Not how much you're given now, but what you're told is coming. The currency is the calendar, and the payment is always scheduled rather than made. It works by borrowing against a future that never arrives.

The reason the distinction matters is that they have different tells. Love bombing you catch by looking at pace. Breadcrumbing you catch by adding up actual contact. Future faking you catch only by looking backwards over months, which is why it survives so much longer than the other two. Nothing about any single conversation looks wrong.

The consequences of the slower forms have been measured. Fernando Navarro and colleagues surveyed 626 adults aged 18 to 40, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in 2020 and available via PubMed Central. People who had been breadcrumbed, or breadcrumbed and ghosted, reported lower satisfaction with life and higher loneliness and helplessness. In their regression models, being breadcrumbed significantly raised the odds of all three.

Helplessness is the word to notice. Not sadness, not anger. The specific feeling of having no lever to pull. That is what being managed on a timeline does to a person, and it is the same residue future faking leaves.

In practice these often run in sequence rather than separately. Love bombing gets you in. Future faking keeps you there when you start to wobble. Breadcrumbing is what the day to day quietly degrades into between the big promises. Our guide on breadcrumbing covers the middle phase, and the hot and cold cycle covers the oscillation that holds the whole thing together.

What Does the Waiting Actually Cost You?

Nobody adds this up while it is happening, which is precisely the problem. The cost arrives in instalments small enough to ignore.

Time you cannot get back. The obvious one, and still the one people underestimate. Four years of next year is four years. Not four conversations.

Decisions you deferred. The job in another city. The flat you did not buy. The friendship group you let thin out because you were always half waiting for plans to firm up. Future faking does not just take the years, it takes the other lives you might have started during them.

Your calibration. This is the sneaky one. When words and reality stop matching for long enough, you lose your read on both. You start over-explaining yourself, checking your memory against theirs, and treating your own clear observations as opinions that need defending. Recovery from that takes longer than the relationship did, and our guide on narcissistic abuse recovery walks through what rebuilding it looks like.

Your baseline for normal. After enough of it, a partner who simply does what they said becomes remarkable rather than standard. That is a bar on the floor, and it will follow you into the next relationship unless you deliberately raise it.

One more thing about how you got here, because it matters and it is not a flaw in you. Reliability sits underneath everything in a relationship, and when someone is warm and vivid but never dependable, the anxious response is to try harder rather than to leave. If that reads uncomfortably close, our guide on anxious attachment explains the mechanism, and why the least reliable people often produce the most desperate effort.

How Do You Stop Buying It?

By changing your unit of measurement. You have been measuring words. Start measuring weeks.

1. Ask for one small dated step, not the big thing. Not will we move in together. Instead, can we look at places on Saturday the ninth. Small and dated is much harder to dodge, and the dodge tells you everything.
2. Write the promises down with dates. Privately. This is not ammunition for an argument. It is protection against your own memory, which will soften the record on its own.
3. Judge the last six months only. Not the potential. Not the best conversation you ever had. What actually happened since February.
4. Stop arguing about whether they meant it. You cannot win that and you cannot verify it. Talk about what happened instead. What happened is checkable.
5. Notice the reset. When you feel your patience refill after a big talk, name it in the moment. Say to yourself, that was a conversation, not a change. It takes the power out of it.
6. Set a real deadline and keep it to yourself. Announced deadlines get negotiated. A private one just arrives, and you get to act on it.
7. Rebuild the ground you stand on. Waiting this long usually means the bar dropped somewhere. Our guide on self worth covers how that happens and how to raise it back.

One hard truth to finish this section. You may leave without ever getting an admission. They may believe until the end that they meant it, and in some sense they did. You still get to go. Sincerity was never the thing you were owed. A life was.

Why Is It So Hard to Leave Once You Can See It?

Because seeing it and being free of it are two different jobs, and nobody tells you that. Most people who leave these relationships could describe the pattern accurately for a year or more before they went.

Part of it is arithmetic that runs the wrong way. The longer you wait, the more expensive leaving feels, because now you are not just losing the relationship, you are writing off everything you already spent getting here. That logic is backwards, since time already gone cannot be recovered by spending more of it. But it does not feel backwards from inside. Our guide on the sunk cost trap covers why the maths goes wrong in exactly this way.

Part of it is that you have an audience. You told people about the move. Your family asked about the wedding. Leaving means a series of small humiliating conversations where you explain that none of it was real, and some part of you would rather stay another six months than have them. This is rarely admitted out loud and it holds an enormous number of people in place.

And part of it is that the promise still occasionally gets renewed. Remember the reset effect. A relationship where nothing happens is easy to leave. A relationship where nothing happens except an extraordinary conversation every eleven weeks is much harder, because the countdown keeps restarting just before it reaches zero. You are not weak for staying through that. You are being timed.

A few things make the gap between knowing and going shorter.

Stop waiting for proof. Many people are quietly holding out for one undeniable incident that makes the decision for them. It usually doesn't come, because the whole pattern is built from things that are individually deniable. A pattern is your evidence. You are allowed to act on it.

Set the deadline before the next big talk, not after. Decisions made in the glow of a promise are not decisions. Write the date down while you're clear-headed, and put it somewhere you'll see it in eight weeks when you are not.

Tell one person the actual timeline. Not to get advice. To have somebody outside your head holding the same set of facts, so the record cannot quietly soften.

Expect to feel worse before better. Leaving does not deliver relief on day one. It usually delivers the grief you have been deferring, which is what the next section is about.

What Are You Actually Grieving When You Leave?

Something specific, and misnaming it keeps people stuck for years.

When most relationships end, you grieve what you had. Here you are grieving something that never existed. The house you can picture the hallway of. The version of your life where the two of you got there. You built that in enormous detail, over years, using material they supplied, and it was never once real.

That produces a strange kind of mourning. There's no photograph of it. Nobody else attended. You cannot really describe the loss without it sounding like you're upset about a conversation, and so most people compress the whole thing into "I wasted my time" and try to move on quickly.

Then it doesn't go, because you skipped the actual loss.

Naming it properly helps more than it should. You are not being dramatic. You lived inside a planned future daily. You made decisions from it, turned things down because of it, and rearranged what you wanted to fit it. Losing that is a real event even though the future was fictional, and it deserves the same treatment you'd give any other ending rather than being argued out of.

Two things tend to follow, and both are normal.

The first is that the anger arrives late. People often feel numb or relieved at first and then get furious months afterwards, sometimes triggered by something trivial. That delay is not a relapse. It's the part of you that was suppressing the evidence finally being allowed to look at it.

The second is that you may grieve the promised version more than the actual person. That feels like a betrayal of your own judgement, and it isn't. The imagined future was better company than they were. Of course you miss it more.

One thing to be careful about while you're in this stage. The imagined future is very easy to reattach to the same person if they come back with a better version of it. Most returns are not new information. They're the same product with fresh packaging, arriving precisely when you are most tired of grieving. Our guide on identity erosion covers rebuilding the sense of what you actually want, which is what the years of waiting tend to blur.

If you want structure for that rather than just time, PositivePsychology.com has practitioner grade exercises on values clarification and future self work, which is useful here precisely because your picture of the future was built by somebody else. Getting it back is a real piece of work, and it's worth doing before the next relationship rather than during it.

When Should You Get Outside Help?

Reach out if you have put major decisions on hold for a promise. If you have turned down opportunities or moved cities for something that never arrived. If you cannot tell any more whether you are being patient or being strung along.

An outside view is genuinely useful here, because the pattern is invisible up close and obvious from a distance. A therapist can help you look at the whole timeline at once instead of promise by promise, which is how most people lose the years.

If you want structured tools to use alongside that, PositivePsychology.com has practitioner grade worksheets on values, boundaries, and decision making. And if leaving feels impossible even though you want to, our guide on trauma bonding explains why, and it is not a character flaw.

What Else Do People Ask About Future Faking?

What is future faking in simple terms?

Future faking is paying you in promises instead of actions. They talk about the house, the trip, the wedding, the baby. None of it gets booked or planned. The talk is not a step toward the future. It is the thing being handed to you instead of the future, and it usually arrives when you are close to leaving.

Do future fakers know they are lying?

Often they do not, and that is why it is so confusing. Many mean every word while saying it. The feeling is real in the moment and gone by Tuesday. Some do it knowingly to keep you in place. Either way you get the same result, which is a relationship that keeps moving forward in conversation only.

How is future faking different from a plan that fell through?

A real plan that fails leaves evidence. Dates, bookings, a conversation about what went wrong, an attempt to reschedule. Future faking leaves nothing behind, and the promise is never mentioned again unless you raise it. One broken plan is life. A pattern of promises that never reach a calendar is the thing to watch.

Why does future faking work so well on me?

Because it feeds hope right when hope is running out. The promise arrives at the exact moment you are ready to walk, and it resets your patience for months. It also flatters you. Being told you are the one they want a life with is powerful, and it makes doubting the promise feel like doubting yourself.

How do I stop falling for empty promises?

Stop treating words as progress. Ask for one small dated step instead of the big promise, then watch what happens by that date. Keep a private list of what was promised and when. Do not argue about intentions, because that is unwinnable. Judge the relationship on what has actually happened in the last six months.

Sources: Wurst, S. N., Gerlach, T. M., Dufner, M., Rauthmann, J. F., Grosz, M. P., Kufner, A. C. P., Denissen, J. J. A., and Back, M. D. (2016), "Narcissism and romantic relationships: The differential impact of narcissistic admiration and rivalry," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, seven studies, N = 3,560 (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27560609). Harhoff, N., Reinhardt, N., Reinhard, M. A., and Mayer, M. (2023), "Agentic and communal narcissism in predicting different types of lies in romantic relationships," Frontiers in Psychology, N = 298 and N = 256 (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10351034). Conner, M., and Norman, P. (2022), "Understanding the intention-behavior gap: The role of intention strength," Frontiers in Psychology, reporting Sheeran (2002) and Webb and Sheeran (2006) (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9386038). Baumgartner, T., Fischbacher, U., Feierabend, A., Lutz, K., and Fehr, E. (2009), "The neural circuitry of a broken promise," Neuron, 64(5), 756-770 (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20005830). Berridge, K. C., and Robinson, T. E. (2016), "Liking, wanting, and the incentive-sensitization theory of addiction," American Psychologist, 71(8), 670-679 (sites.lsa.umich.edu/berridge-lab). Ganschow, B., Zebel, S., van Gelder, J. L., and Cornet, L. J. M. (2024), "Feeling connected but dissimilar to one's future self reduces the intention-behavior gap," PLOS One, N = 90 (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11265703). Topa, G., Aranda-Carmena, M., and De-Maria, B. (2022), "Psychological contract breach and outcomes: a systematic review of reviews," International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, reporting effect sizes from Zhao, H., Wayne, S. J., Glibkowski, B. C., and Bravo, J. (2007), Personnel Psychology, 60, 647 to 680 (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9737235). Navarro, R., Larranaga, E., Yubero, S., and Villora, B. (2020), "Psychological correlates of ghosting and breadcrumbing experiences: a preliminary study among adults," International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(3), 1116, N = 626 (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7037474). Oettingen, G., and Schworer, B. (2013), "Mind wandering via mental contrasting as a tool for behavior change," Frontiers in Psychology, reporting Oettingen and Mayer (2002) (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3759023).

For self-reflection purposes only. Not a substitute for professional mental health support. If you feel unsafe, please contact a local domestic abuse or crisis helpline.