What does love bombing look like when you can’t see or recognize it—until you find yourself in the wreckage, from where you least expected it?
Love bombing isn’t just about gifts, lavish dinners, roses, and trips. The grand gestures and the early “I love yous” are the obvious signs. But there’s also a kind of love bombing that’s more subtle, and therefore more insidious, because you don’t realize it’s happening.
We’re talking about emotional love bombing. It can look like intense closeness and intimacy, like hints that you’re made for each other (even as a joke in the beginning), or that your connection is meant to be. It might involve pretending to be a couple, like a game, planning your future together “just for fun.” But after enough of this, you start to believe it could really happen.
It can look like deep sharing and vulnerability, way too much for how little time you’ve known each other. They might express complex emotions and existential fears on the first date, dive into childhood trauma, talk about how broken or damaged they are, how much they’ve been hurt in the past, that they’re people pleasers and need to stop doing everything for others and learn to care for themselves too.
It can make you want, more than anything, to protect them, to save them, to never leave or betray them. You promise: I’ll be different. I’m here now. It can look like them giving you their undivided attention, showing genuine interest in your every thought, focusing on everything you say, and then, two weeks later, once the sparkle of novelty fades, they suddenly cut it off or start breadcrumbing you. And you’re left chasing those crumbs, because compared to what came before, the loss feels devastating.
At first, they may seem to meet all your emotional needs, especially if you come from a background where you were ignored, neglected, or overlooked. You feel like you’ve finally found what you were looking for. So when they pull back and you feel it slipping away, you lose your mind trying to get it back. You’re willing to do anything, sink to any depth, just to reclaim what you had in the beginning.
Only… what you had in the beginning wasn’t real. The tragedy is that the person doesn’t need to be abusive to do all this. It would be easier if we could just label them, make a diagnosis, point the finger, but unfortunately, reality is more complicated.
Some people do this without realizing it, because they’re avoidant, or simply emotionally unavailable. This is how they show up when they first meet someone and idealize them, convinced once again that this person will solve all their problems.
Gradually, as they get to know the other person better, they’re disappointed to find they’re just human, no matter how amazing that human may be. They’re not a god. They’re disappointed that even this person can’t save them from themselves. That’s what it means to be emotionally immature and unavailable. They may wish they could be in a relationship, an idealized, fantasy version of one, but for now, at least, they can’t.
That’s why we often talk about the “honeymoon fortnight” (which might last longer), and then suddenly, they disappear. Or they go from being present and consistent to acting distant, slow to reply, making no plans to see you. They let the connection fade while telling you they’re “just really busy,” and that you’re overreacting. But in every cell of your body, you know that something has changed. And you feel like the whole thing is collapsing—or was a lie. But it wasn’t necessarily all a lie. It just wasn’t the whole truth either.
And that’s what hurts the most, because you believed it in your heart you could finally have that magic of the honeymoon stage. You can’t bear the idea that it wasn’t real. Sadly, now the only thing that’s real is the crumbs.
Look at the reality of it. Ask yourself: are crumbs enough for me? And how long can I stay emotionally starved?
It’s so much harder to walk away when the other person isn’t a villain. But still, they’re not right for you.
Forgive yourself for falling for emotional love bombing. It’s incredibly, incredibly hard to resist. It feels like the most wonderful confirmation and sense of completion you can imagine. Trust me, I know.