This is What Love-Bombing Looks Like
And why it’s a red flag for future abuse
I hadn’t known him for more than a month. The ink on the divorce papers from my first husband wasn’t even dry. I was vulnerable because of pain from my past that I’d yet to work through. I was a newly single mom to a young son and had moved to a new city to start over.
And at the age of 29, I was empty, which fed my desperation to rid myself of that emptiness.
Then he stepped in. Well, it was more like he whooshed in. Since we were both dance teachers, he figuratively and literally swept me off my feet.
He was like a sudden storm that burst from the clouds, drenching everything in its path.
Like one moment I was watching a giant wave coming my way from my place on the shore and within seconds I was swept up and riding the wave with him, the speed making the world pass in a blur.
Like a rollercoaster that I didn’t remember standing in line for, and now I was on top of the curve about to freefall into the depths below — I was scared as hell and yet still didn’t want to get off.
We hadn’t had a first date yet. We hadn’t had a first kiss. I had inklings of how he felt because of his excessive flirtations, the way he showed up when I least expected it, and showered me with his attention. But I was not in any way prepared for him to disregard the steps of courtship and jump right from A to the middle of the alphabet, while I still waited at the letter B.
Much like in Christmas Story when Schwartz chose to forsake protocol by skipping the triple dare and going straight for the “I triple dog dare you!”
Like that.
One evening after work, he approached me with a serious look on his face, a secret in his eyes, and a smirk on his lips. I thought maybe he was going to ask me out to dinner, or maybe for coffee…you know, something normal for two people who barely knew each other.
Instead, he handed me a mixed cassette tape he’d made (that’s how we still rolled in the 90s).
Staring deep into my eyes, he said, “I want you to listen to the first song on your way home. And think of me…”
I was excited and anxious and a little scared all at the same time. What secrets were about to be revealed? What treasure chest was I about to open? And why did it feel like my life was about to change forever?
He walked me to my car, watched as I got in, then winked. “See you later,” he said.
I put the cassette tape into the player but waited until I was out of his sight before I hit Play.
Within seconds, Bryan Adams’ voice swooned through my speakers.
To really love a woman
Let her hold you
’Til you know how she needs to be touched
You’ve got to breathe her, really taste her
’Til you can feel her in your blood
And when you can see your unborn children in her eyes…
WAIT A MINUTE, what? I rewound the tape and played it again.
I suddenly felt warm all over. A bit shaken. And very confused.
Love? Children? Breathe me, taste me, feel me in his blood?
And yet, the lack of love and affection and validation from my first husband and emotionally abusive father set me up as juicy prey to any wolfish appetite. Though my intuition blared alarm bells, those empty spaces within cried out, You’ve finally found him! Your soul mate has arrived!
The pace of our relationship only accelerated from there. Once he found me to be a willing participant of his crusade-like fixation to win me over, our relationship moved at a dizzying speed.
The night of our first kiss, I went to his house and we lay on the couch together. Our faces inches away, I prepared for our lips to finally meet. Instead, he brought his mouth to mine and asked me to exhale so he could “breathe in my soul.”
Believing this was some divine repayment for the lack of love and affection from men in my past, and also not wanting to jinx my luck or look a gift horse in the mouth (believing in my desperation that this was a gift and not the Trojan horse it actually turned out to be), I was game for whatever he had in store.
He said the Universe had summoned me to redeem him for all his past sins. I was the woman who would help him become the man he always wanted to be. We were soulmates, brought together by a higher power. All the crimes he’d committed in the past could now be forgiven with my love and my open heart.
As the months passed, his attention and passion escalated.
He wrote me romantic letters, he flew me to his home country of Nicaragua and showed me off like a new car. He made public displays of his feelings for me, such as when we were in line at a popular pizza parlor and he recited the poem Daffodils by Wordsworth to everyone’s enjoyment and applause. He danced with me in the aisles of the grocery store and in the middle of Target and while we waited for a table at any busy restaurant. When I needed furniture for my new apartment, he gave me an extra bed of his along with new sheets and a bed skirt.
Yes, the man put on a fucking bed skirt.
And I believed I’d won the jackpot.
All of this happened within the first six months of knowing one another. By that time, I was hooked. Addicted like he was a drug, which made it ever so easy for me to ignore the fields of red flags that popped up in the charred wake of the wildfire that was our early relationship.
So he’d screwed around on his previous girlfriend with his good friend’s wife. And been fired from a previous managerial job for sexual harassment. So he’d been married before; it only lasted a few months because he needed a way to stay in the country. And so he called every woman and girl Sweetie or Amor. Or had that little rage problem that seeped out when I least expected it.
And on our first dinner date, he took me to Hooters, where we ordered wings from breasts.
So what?
I was on this earth to save him, after all. He was a changed man because of me, he said. He needed me to show him how to be a better person. He had evolved, was now enlightened, and newly educated all because I had come into his life.
Surely the passionate sex we were having several times a day and the multiple orgasms I was experiencing was also proof that I had found the man of my dreams, right?
Wrong.
“Love-bombing happens when someone overwhelms you with loving words, actions, and behavior as a manipulation technique. It involves over-the-top gestures and is often done by a narcissist with the intent of drawing in and gaining control.”
Signs of love-bombing (from Healthline):
· They lavish you with gifts.
· They can’t stop complimenting you.
· They bombard you with phone calls and texts.
· They want your undivided attention.
· They try to convince you that you’re soulmates.
· They get upset when you place boundaries.
· They’re overly needy.
· You’re overwhelmed by their intensity.
· You feel unbalanced.
In my own defense, not every sign above was true in my case — after all, we didn’t have cell phones in the 90s.
Other than texts, however, my story is a classic “Narcissist Meets Vulnerable Woman and Drops the L-Bomb.”
You may be asking yourself, What’s so bad about being bombed with love?
It sure sounds appealing, especially to someone who has never received that kind of attention and is in desperate need of it (i.e. me when I first met him).
But the problem is in the intention. And the term love-bombing is somewhat of a misnomer because it’s not their love they’re showering you with, but the perception of love.
The aftereffects are, therefore, devastating.
Remember that rollercoaster I was riding in the beginning? Over the course of our marriage, the twists and turns became too much to handle to the point of making me sick. The final blow coming sixteen years later when I was thrown from the ride and landed flat on my back, in pain and shock after discovering my husband’s double life and having the psychologist we’d sought marital counseling from utter the words, “Your husband is a narcissist.”
Like any bomb, once it’s been detonated, the fallout is delayed. Though the beginning of my relationship with a narcissist was electrifying and explosive, the years following contained what felt like radiation from the initial blast that I couldn’t feel or see but was slowly poisoning me from the inside out.
The reason is that a narcissist uses love-bombing only as a trap to get you to fall for them quickly before their mask falls off.
Once I was hooked, once I married him and bore his children and committed to a long life together, I wasn’t able to extricate myself from a relationship that continued to worsen over the years because I was too invested. I had made vows. We had built a life for our children that I wanted to see through to the end. Plus, I loved him.
Despite his inability to feel love for anyone, especially me.
It was as if my world had flipped and suddenly I found myself no longer on the receiving end of his praise and adulation, but instead his scorn and contempt.
Like any bomb, once it’s been detonated, the fallout is delayed.
The man who initially professed I had saved him later berated me for my very existence. The man who drenched me with his attention and passion later ignored me for days on end. The man who danced with me at every opportunity later left me home alone while he danced with others. And the man who all those years ago wanted to “breathe my soul” later morphed into an emotional vampire who drained all the lifeblood from me and left me for dead.
This is what love-bombing looks like. It has nothing to do with love and everything to do with the real purpose of any bomb: to shock, overwhelm, overpower, and eventually destroy.
This is what narcissistic abuse looks like, and it starts off with a bang so that any victim becomes distracted from the hidden evil that lurks underneath.
Most importantly, this is what freedom from the pain a narcissist inflicts looks like:
Me, here with you, able to share my story from the vantage point of having my experience and the darkness I existed within left far behind once I discovered the truth about love and what it really looks like.
And the truth is, love is not dropped like a bomb. It doesn’t overwhelm or annihilate or throw you off-center. Love isn’t a tool to be used to hook or trap another. Love doesn’t detonate and send you running for cover.
Love takes its time. It has no motive. No reason for trying to trick you into believing it exists. Love makes you feel safe and warm and goes at a pace you’re comfortable with. Love grows, it expands, it deepens and develops and evolves.
Love is knowing you’re out of harm’s way.
And now that I know what love is and what it looks like, it is my hope that by sharing my experience, you will too.