Confessions of a Former Love Bomber
I’m a former love bomber and I am not what you think I am
I first became aware of the term “love bombing” after getting back together with my partner after our second break up. She must have done some research or gotten some feedback from her friends. When we got back together, my habits of expressing my love got started again. But this time she would talk about them differently. Instead of appreciating my daily morning poems of love, she called them “love bombs,” which hurt. I felt she was dismissing my genuine feelings toward her, and in fact, she was. She would say: “I love it! I love when you say those things. But they are love bombs.” I didn’t know what that term meant, but I could feel the dismissive aspect of it. I didn’t like it, but I just kept going.
A little more than a year later, the relationship ended for the final time. Sad and painful, it was the right thing for both of us. Here’s why it was right for both of us, and why it was the beginning of my own healing.
What Is a Love Bomber?
Since then, I have noticed the term “love bomb” come up repeatedly in articles about relationships, especially toxic relationships. One such article outlined six key identifying behaviors of love bombers:
Showering you with adoring compliments
Offer and give expensive gifts
Declare that they love you or adore you
Make efforts to remain in constant contact
Seek commitment too fast
Violate healthy boundaries
Check, check, and check. I was a love bomber.
However, there was one thing in all the descriptions that was incorrect, offensive, and prevented me from seeing sooner what it was I was doing. The underlying descriptions all pointed to one thing: manipulation. They said things like this: “They want to make you like them by making you feel loved,” or “In an effort to get you to feel indebted to them,” or “express their love quickly… in an effort to win them over.” They describe the love bomber as looking to lock the other person into a relationship. In the article cited, Dr. Courtney Warren is very direct. “It’s a manipulative dating tactic used to make a potential dating partner dependent on and invested in the relationship—before having adequate time to evaluate whether it’s a good fit.”
These descriptions make the love bomber look like a monster—underhanded, manipulative, controlling, strategic. They suggest a purposeful and conscious intention to mislead and control. I’m sure there are people who are so controlling that they use love bombing to intentionally manipulate their partners. While my behaviors with my former partner definitely constituted love bombing, it was never a consciously intentional effort to manipulate or control. My behavior had that effect, no doubt, and for that I am responsible, but it was not conscious or intentional. Rather, it came from my own wounds and fears, and only when these are made conscious can this toxic behavior be stopped. Here’s what I learned doing it myself.