Love Bombing...

Love bombing, is a manipulative tactic, often characterized by excessive and seemingly overwhelming displays of affection, attention, and gifts, especially in the early stages of a relationship. It can involve constant contact, excessive compliments, and rushing the relationship toward deeper commitments like marriage or moving in together. If these behaviors feel intense and overwhelming, and you're experiencing pressure to move things forward quickly, it could be a sign of love bombing.

Here are the tops signs:

Over-the-top displays of affection:

This includes lavish gifts, excessive compliments, and an intense desire to spend all your time together.

Constant communication:

Being contacted 24/7, needing constant reassurance, and a desire to know your whereabouts at all times can be a sign.

Rushing the relationship:

Talking about marriage, kids, or moving in together very early in the relationship, or pressure to make these plans.

Ignoring your boundaries:

They might disregard your personal space, time, or opinions, and become defensive or dismissive when you express concerns.

Making you feel special or perfect:

They might give you excessive compliments, praise your every action, or make you feel like you are their soulmate, even if you haven't spent much time together.

Heightened emotional reactions:

They might become easily angered or upset if you disagree with them or try to slow things down.

Using gifts as a way to make you feel indebted:

The constant gift-giving might feel like a way to make you feel obligated or indebted to them.

How this impacts your life negatively:

Love bombing is a form of manipulation that can isolate you from your support system and make you dependent on the love bomber for your happiness and sense of self-worth. It can also be a precursor to more severe forms of abuse, as the love bomber may later shift to devaluation and discard. If you're concerned about love bombing, resources from organizations like Respect Victoria and the University of Colorado Boulder can provide further information and support.

Also, from my own personal experience, this is super hard to turn down.  Someone who you are into, appears to be super into you.  They anticipate your every need and feed into your desire and longing for that person that just “gets you.”  Some of us, have been waiting our whole lives for this kind of connection.  And when it kicks off, it seems like the answer to a life long prayer.  So it is super hard to use discernment and caution when it all feels so right.

After having been burned by the falsehood that is love bombing, you can’t be anything but hesitant.  Again, my own experience is that while that first time felt so real and right, the ultimate shitshow, dumpster fire that resulted is something I will never forget, as the scars it leaves are permanent.  I cannot help but evaluate every single man going forward who is super nice to me or seemingly into me without a huge degree of skepticism. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I feel that I have kind of lost the plot.  How am I supposed to know what is genuine affection and what is just the very beginning of a long plod towards abuse, control and a whole bunch of bullshit I do not need?

It isn’t easy.  The only thing I have seen that works is resistance, and time.  As awful as it feels not to allow yourself to be swept away by the affection overload, if you have been burned in this fashion before, you almost can’t allow yourself that kind of indulgence again.  It is too painful and the juice is not worth the squeeze.  And if you haven’t been burned like this before, trust me when I say that the period of reconstruction is life lasting and hard.  How do you ever trust someone again when your trust, so freely given, is handed back to you in a shit sandwich that you must painfully not only finish but pretend to enjoy?  Believe me when I say, it is really hard to heal from this particular kind of abuse and it will change you, forever.

And time.  Putting things on a slow roll will frustrate a would be narcissistic suitor/love bomber.  They need you to jump on their bandwagon asap because they are not going to be able to keep up the charade for too long.  They are wincing underneath all the lavish attention being thrown your way and they need to hurry up and get you to focus on what is really important:  THEM!

I think the most important thing to remember in all of this, is this type of behavior is not designed to build connection like it pretends.  It is designed to manipulate you into submission.  If you find yourself being lavished with attention, affection, interest, gifts, it it the unfortunate reality that you should question the motives and then sit on your hands long enough to see who this person really is over time. 

Trust me when I say the love bomber does not have the luxury of time.  They need to get you on their team ASAP!  Because the attention, affection, interest and purported value they give you is not truthful or honest, it is a ploy to get you to do what they want and to manipulate you into reciprocating all that they have offered except 100 fold.  They give to get, and as soon as they believe they have you hooked, they begin to withdraw all the things that made you look their way to begin with...

Perhaps the most important thing I have learned from this heartrending experience is the old adage:  if it seems to good to be true, it usually is. 

Healthy relationships are based on mutuality and reciprocity.  As good as it feels to have someone show up for you, want you, desire you, chase you, I think it is important to see that the whole dynamic is off from the get go.  You are holding back and they are bombing the shit out of you, because they have to. They have to win you over, because the whole point is to get you on their side so they can get back to the very important task which is them and their agenda.  Always.

If you are being love bombed, be wary.  Healthy people have interests in things other than you and they are not so quick to clear their schedules and lives because of some new person they have barely met and hardly know.  Intimacy takes time.  And work.  And time.  Yes, I know I said that twice.  We all want to believe in the "love at first sight" love story. But honestly, how many of those “love stories” would really survive the test of time.  We only see a snapshot of time that Hollywood wants us to see.  We are skipping over the hard times, the conflict (that is inevitable in all human relationships), and the very hard to swallow truth that the only way to truly come to know someone is to allow them into your world, slowly, observing them over time in a multitude of situations and watch how they show up.  If the whole relationship is predicated on you succumbing to their charms, I promise you that it won’t be long before the charm wears thin and you are forced into the role of ensuring that this person, once so promising of equality and balance, insists that their needs, wants, desires and truths become the epicenter of your life.

And also trust me when I tell you, your needs, wants, desires and truths will only serve to become the fodder with which they beat you senseless.

Aim for love exchange...mutuality of interest and intensity.  If you aim for the middle, you might not be so attracted to the extremes...

I mean, maybe, it could all be true.  But if you give it time, you will likely come to see it for what it is, another quick hit, destined to make you forever at their mercy and always to blame for everything that goes wrong in their lives.

Please, trust me when I say "again, still" in this particular situation, you are carving yourself up and sacrificing yourself for someone who will, in the end, take you for all you are worth and wouldn’t bother to toss a cup on water on you if you were on fire. Which is as painful in its application as it is in its remembering.

I know.  I have been there.  And I am working on changing the parts of me that were susceptible to this type of abuse to begin with.  I cannot change others, but in changing myself, I do provide myself a certain amount of armor from falling prey to this bullshit ever again...