“You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love,” wrote the Czech writer Franz Kafka to his lover, Milena, in 1920. In other dispatches, he grows more desperate: “I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.” His letters—so overwrought, so earnest—serves as a reminder that lovesickness can burn like a fever. They’re also, at times, bizarre and unsettling. In one, Kafka fantasizes about the world ending so he can meet his lover one last time. Kafka had only met Milena twice. Their fiery relationship was scattered over five days and two cities, and then Kafka broke up with her.
In a modern context, Kafka might be accused of love-bombing Milena—after all, she was a woman he barely knew. In modern dating culture and pop psychology, we’ve been advised to steer clear of bombastic pronouncements of love. On TikTok, the hashtag love-bombing has almost 50,000 posts where people dole out truisms like, “Love-bombing comes from someone who has a serious void in himself.” They have poor impulse control and no filter. Someone who comes on too strong, too quickly, is regarded as bad news in a dating culture preoccupied with identifying potential red flags. We’re taught to be on the lookout for disingenuousness everywhere, parsing through text messages for deception. I have a friend who wondered if a potential date was love-bombing her with the message: “I’m really looking forward to meeting you!”
I have another good friend who is frustratingly endearing, funny, and good-looking. In the years of our friendship, almost everyone I introduce him to is immediately taken with him, men and women alike. He has a charm that is impossible to mimic but quickly recognizable. Naturally, he’s constantly being accused of leading people on. “I’ve been accused of love-bombing many times,” he tells me. But I’m grateful for people like my friend—a heartbreaker, a deadly flirt, a person who makes your pulse race from across the room—and I’m suspicious of a cultural value that moralizes this behavior as malicious.
I have another friend who feels cavalier about love-bombing. She’s in a happy, long-term relationship with someone she felt infatuated with instantly. “I have been love-bombed, obviously. And, I have love-bombed, obviously.” She tells me love-bombing is common in queer female relationships. “In the lesbian community, I don’t know if it’s called love-bombing. It’s just kind of an average dating experience.” She jokes that something is wrong if your partner has not said “I love you” by the third date. “When you get love-bombed, you have to have a level of delusion to think a person you barely know fell in love with you.” On her second date with her partner, she bought them a TV. That was too much, she admits, but she doesn’t regret it: “Sometimes, it works out beautifully!”
Where did the concept of love-bombing come from?
The idea of love-bombing is nothing new, of course. Movies and pop culture reinforce the idea of love as an all-consuming, obsessive, almost mysterious impulse. One that made Ryan Gosling climb a Ferris Wheel in The Notebook and Romeo Juliet commit mutual destruction a mere day after meeting. In The Great Gatsby, a man spends a lifetime social-climbing to be reunited with a one-month fling. Are these stories we perceive as the pinnacle of tenderness actually examples of toxic and ill-advised infatuation?
But can we go a little deeper—where does the modern term come from?
Love-bombing, as a phrase in the zeitgeist, is only a recent phenomenon. Psychologists coined the term in the 1970s as a tactic used by cults to recruit new members. Cults have been known to bombard recruits with compliments, gifts, and affection as a means of emotional manipulation. Since then, the term has been used to identify recruitment strategies implemented by various charismatic leaders.
Love-bombing, as a term applied to romantic relationships, is more recent. Infographics on Instagram advise partners how to spot and reject love-bombing tactics. According to these infographics, the signs of love-bombing can be as broad as gift-giving to bombastic compliments like “I like everything about you.” The term love-bombing has become a catch-all phrase for a partner who gives too much, too fast. This is not to say love-bombing does not exist. Love-bombing, as a calculated practice of manipulation, is insidious and is not gender-specific behavior, yet the use of the term has become casual, divorced from its original definition.
Why are so many people talking about love-bombing now?
One explanation for the current cache of “love-bombing” is that modern dating norms have warped our expectations around even innocent gestures of affection, making them seem somehow suspect. TikTok and Instagram are chock-full of advice for distinguishing between love-bombing and genuine attraction. They argue that real affection comes from a place of sincerity, not overwhelming your partner to elicit a response. The love they show you is proportional to the length of your relationship.
Marriage and family therapist Randé Dorn, author of the book Wanted Millionaire Spiritual, But Not Religious, argues that the difference between love-bombing and appropriate warmth is an element of control: “With (healthy attraction), you might feel excited, but also calm. If the intention is control and manipulation, that’s when it can feel confusing in our bodies.” Today, dating seems inundated with an aura of suspicion and paranoia. It is precisely that fear—of getting ghosted, hurt, or rejected that has caused Gen Z to date less than previous generations.
It’s also possible that the rise of the concept of “self love” has played into the rise of “love-bombing.” Dorn notes that as self-love becomes a prevalent cultural value, rejection can feel malicious and intentional. “We re told on social media that we re all so amazing. We are faultless. But rejection is normal. It’s part of life,” says Dorn. Rather than acknowledging, “that was just hard. It s hard to feel rejected,” Dorn says, we look for a culprit. We see our partner’s behavior in a new, unflattering light—we search for damning narratives to evade culpability, and social media has equipped us with new language. Overestimating someone’s affection can feel humiliating and disconcerting. It can be tempting, in return, to pathologize the ways our partner hurt us—an exercise in intellectualizing our pain in an attempt to escape it.
Is there a clinical understanding of love-bombing?
The flurry of infographics and pop psychology surrounding dating has often distorted and appropriated language that has more clinical meaning. Pop-psychology terms like gaslighting, love-bombing, and narcissism have taken on new, casual meanings as they’ve infiltrated our cultural language. Dorn says that social media has contributed to a broadening definition and confusion about the meaning of love-bombing. Terms like “love bombing” and “gaslighting” are “often poorly defined on social media," she notes. “People are trying to categorize their own experience versus objectively asking what it means to be, for example, a narcissist.”
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We are all guilty of wanting to avoid blame, of course, and these social-media-fueled mechanisms for understanding our emotional life can encourage the tendency. It is tempting to believe that litigating and ascribing rigid rules to our dating lives will keep our hearts safe. But heartbreak can be a useful experience where we learn about ourselves.
If I like someone, I am often quick to say it—in both romantic relationships and friendships. I have also met men—as most of us have—who briefly convinced me that I held their universe together. Of course, I came to find out I did not. It’s what made the romance compelling, the way I willingly allowed a stranger to destroy me. They have likely had this dizzying effect on many people—a symptom of undeniable charisma. Is that not part of what is intoxicating about romance, the way our own enthusiasm can betray and surprise us? A friend recently said to me over drinks: “There’s no getting out of getting hurt in this life, especially in love.” I tend to agree.