He Talks About the Future But Never Makes Plans: The Tarot Truth Behind the Empty Promises

We would get dressed up and go to dinner and he would talk about our trip to Portugal. The restaurant we would find. The light in October. He described it like he had already been. Like it was something we had already done and I had simply forgotten.

I started to notice the pattern. He never said "let's" do this. He said "we will." We will go there. We will do that. We will live there someday. The words were full of us. But when I tried to look up flights, he changed the subject. When I asked about timing, he said let's not plan too far ahead. I was holding a map to a country that only existed in his imagination.

What the Cards Named That I Kept Ignoring

I didn't want to read this one honestly. Reading about it would mean accepting that the future he was describing was not actually ours. It was his. A fantasy he liked to inhabit when the present moment required something real from him.

The Honest Question I Started Asking

I used to ask: "Why won't he make plans with me?" Which assumes there is a reason he is holding back and if I could just understand it, I could help him get past it. I was putting all the work on understanding him. None of the work on what I actually needed.

Here is the question that changed things: "Can I live inside this conversation forever? Can I love someone who will only ever give me someday?" The answer was honest and it hurt. I couldn't. I was not built for a relationship that exists entirely in future tense. I needed someone who could say "Saturday, 2pm, I'll pick you up." Not "someday, maybe, if everything aligns."

The Thing About Future Talk

Future talk without follow-through is not a love language. It is a placeholder. It gives you just enough of the emotional experience of being wanted — the warmth, the belonging, the sense that someone sees you in their life — without requiring him to actually do anything. It is the most elegant form of keeping someone without having them. And the worst part is, the person doing it usually doesn't even realize they're doing it. He genuinely felt good talking about Portugal. He genuinely wanted it. He just couldn't translate wanting into doing.

The tarot showed me something I needed to separate: desire is not the same as commitment. He could want the trip and still not book it. He could love me and still not make me a priority in his calendar. Those things can both be true. And I had been treating his desire as proof of his commitment, which it never was.

What I Finally Understood

The cards didn't tell me he didn't love me. They told me he loved the idea of us more than the reality of us. And that is a very specific kind of heartbreak — because you can't even be angry about it. He wasn't lying. He was just living in a story where we were further along than we actually were. And every time he talked about Portugal, I wanted to believe we were those people. The people who would actually go.

But I wasn't those people. I was someone who had a reservation at a nice restaurant and a man who liked to describe the version of us that didn't exist yet. I was already there, building the future with him in small moments. He was somewhere else entirely, enjoying the daydream.

If you are in this place — living in the someday, waiting for the plan that never comes — I want you to ask yourself the question the tarot kept asking me: "Is this enough?" Not "is he capable of change?" Not "does he love me enough to try?" But: is this, right now, the relationship I actually want to be in? Because the Portugal trip is not a plan. It is a wish. And you deserve someone who makes plans.