Yay, you’ve found a great match – the conversation flows and you feel you click like never before. They’re warm and welcoming and overwhelm you with compliments, gifts, attention and love. Everything is perfect, maybe even a bit too perfect.
However, as your relationship develops and becomes more serious, things start to change. All the compliments and attention come to a fairly abrupt stop, leaving you yearning for more.
It’s at this point that you may want to question whether you’ve been love bombed.
What is love bombing?
Love bombing, as the name suggests, is what happens when someone overwhelms you with love and attention. Though it may seem like a wonderful thing, in actuality, it is a way of emotionally manipulating a partner’s behaviours and choices.
It’s a technique often associated with scammers, con artists and narcissists.
Love bombers tend to portray themselves as ideal partner and lovers, often by showering you with compliments, gifts and admiration. In this way, they hope to quickly win you over.
Their main aim is to control you for their own personal benefit and, more often than not, to boost their ego. In other words, it’s manipulative and selfish.
How to Identify the warning signs
As the ulterior motive of most love bombers is to have control over someone else, they achieve this by conditioning the other’s behaviour.
In a romantic relationship, this can occur in several ways. Commonly, love bombers will switch between showing you excessive amounts of love and attention before switching to criticism and giving you the cold shoulder.
Here are some warning signs of how a love bomber might act:
- They shower you with love, affection and attention from the very beginning, which may feel like too much, too soon.
- They are very needy and demand all of your attention. They may do this by making you feel bad for meeting up with friends and family, in which way they start isolating you from others.
- Although every relationship advances at a different pace, love bombers tend to speed things up and make big commitments very early on.
How to avoid love bombing?
Avoiding love bombing can sometimes be easier said than done. Especially as it can be difficult to disentangle genuine feelings from manipulative tactics when you’re all wrapped up in the new and exciting emotions of a new date.
If you feel like you are being love-bombed, here are some suggestions for what to do next.
First and foremost, it’s important that you ensure your own safety.
Reach out to your support network so that you have somewhere to go or someone to talk to outside of your current relationship. This will help you clarify what you’re feeling and also help understand or acknowledge that you are being love-bombed.
