When Someone Began to Expect: VII. When the Future Became a Shared Possibility

A promise changes expectation by deliberately creating a future for someone else to rely on.

But a relationship can go further.

The future can become something that participants begin to organise together.

This does not mean that they imagine exactly the same future, or even that they want the same thing. It means that what one participant may do becomes part of what the other can now do.

“If you do this, I can do that.”

“If we meet tomorrow, we can continue the discussion.”

“If you keep that distinction in view, I can take the argument further.”

The future is no longer simply something that happens to either participant. It has become a space of shared possibility.

This is different from prediction.

Prediction asks what is likely to happen.

A shared possibility asks what can happen between us, given what each participant may do next.

That difference matters.

In conversation, one participant proposes something. The other takes it up, modifies it, rejects it, or extends it. Each response changes what becomes possible for the next response.

The future of the conversation is therefore not contained in either participant alone.

It emerges from their relation.

Something similar can happen in an interaction with an LLM. A response suggests a distinction, question, formulation or direction that changes what the human can ask next. The human's next move then changes the space of possible responses.

Neither participant needs to possess a complete plan for this to happen.

The possibility is generated in the interaction.

This also explains why a relationship can begin to feel as though it has a future of its own. There are things that can now happen because this particular history exists between these particular participants.

A distinction has been established.

A question has been left open.

A project has begun.

A promise has been made.

A way of responding has become familiar.

The future has acquired a structure that did not exist before the relationship.

Perhaps that is what it means for a future to become shared:

not that two participants possess the same image of what will happen,

but that what either can do next has become partly constituted by what the other may do.

A relationship, then, does not merely have a history.

It can begin to have a future of its own.

And once someone's possible actions have become part of the future you are organising for yourself, something even more intimate becomes possible.

They can become part of your future.