What Is Love Bombing? 7 Signs You Should Know

Love bombing is a manipulative tactic where a person says and does things at the beginning of a relationship that make you believe they are madly in love with you. But these actions are insincere.

The goal of a “love bomber” is to earn your trust quickly by fast-forwarding through the initial stages of a relationship.

Once they have gained your love and trust with their over-the-top displays of affection, the person flips the switch and shows their true colors.

What often follows is serious emotional and even physical abuse.

Love bombing is a tactic often used by narcissists and abusers who don’t hesitate to hurt others just to get their needs met.

Although this sounds straightforward enough, love bombing can be difficult to spot and many people hesitate to say someone is being manipulative just because they appear to be very affectionate.

Many of us have dealt with emotionally unavailable partners in the past, so when we encounter someone who is the polar opposite, we want to believe they are genuine.

Thankfully, there are several signs that will help you recognize love bombing:

1. Over-the-top communication

Frequently communicating with one another via calls or texts is nothing out of the ordinary, especially at the beginning of a relationship.

But if your new boyfriend or girlfriend’s intense communication style is making you uncomfortable, this is a subtle red flag that can indicate love bombing.

For example, they could be blowing up your phone when you’re busy working and become upset when you don’t respond quickly. Or they might demand video calls any time you can’t see each other in person.

If you tried to confront your partner about their behavior and their only response was defensiveness or false promises of change, you can tick that off as another red flag.

A respectful partner would honor your boundaries, not try to walk all over them.

2. Your relationship is quickly all over social media

Even if you’re okay with sharing details of your personal life on social media, you should be wary if your new partner is suddenly posting you everywhere, all the time.

This is another sign of love bombing that can be hard to recognize, simply because we love attention.

It can be a powerful ego boost when someone “claims” you on social media and announces to everyone you’re together.

Manipulative people will often use social media to create the illusion of intimacy and gain your trust.

It’s easier to believe that someone has fallen head over heels in love with you when they’re posting you to their Instagram every other day. But they could have ulterior motives.

3. Excessive compliments

Excessive complimenting is a powerful love bombing tool because everyone likes to be told they are successful, beautiful, intelligent, etc.

And when someone is love bombing you, they will compliment you constantly.

At some point, you’ll probably feel uncomfortable – it’s important to recognize that discomfort as a warning sign.

Your partner is buttering you up with compliments that are anything but sincere.

Their only goal is for you to lower your guard so they can get what they want.

4. Inappropriately lavish gifts

Gifts are wonderful, especially when they show genuine care and effort.

But when someone is going all out with lavish gifts very early into the relationship, it’s a sign they could be love bombing you.

It’s entirely normal to be put off by excessive gifts at the beginning of a relationship. This doesn’t make you unromantic.

Such behavior is inappropriate because certain gifts require a level of intimacy that cannot be forged.

In this scenario, the gifts are there to develop a sense of obligation on your part.

If someone buys you fine jewelry on your one-month anniversary, you might choose to ignore their other problematic behavior because you feel like you owe them something.

Although this doesn’t make any rational sense, our emotions can guilt-trip us into tolerating poor behavior.

Your new partner might also attempt to change your appearance or behavior by using gifts.

If they buy you new makeup or clothes and then get upset when you don’t wear them, they are trying to force you to change into who they want you to be.

5. Lack of respect for your boundaries

Love bombing goes hand in hand with disrespectful behavior such as ignoring your boundaries.

A good way to test this is to set any boundary.

For example, how would they respond if you told them that you don’t do last-minute dates?

Would they honor that and make plans in advance or would they become irritated and try to convince you that you’re being unreasonable?

Also, it’s important to pay attention to how they react when you tell them “no”.

Someone who is love bombing you won’t care about what you want – it’s all about their needs and what they want to get out of the relationship.

6. Fast-forwarding the relationship

Fast-forwarding is an integral part of love bombing and future faking, which happens when someone you’re dating makes wild promises about your joint future that they have no intention of fulfilling.

When someone is fast-forwarding the relationship, they will act as though you’ve already been dating for months.

Saying “I love you” one month into the relationship, meeting all of their friends and family members, telling you they want to move in together – all of this counts as fast-forwarding.

Fast-forwarding is a major sign of love bombing because it makes you feel like you’re much closer to your new partner than you actually are.

You forget that you don’t know each other that well, and so you quickly become overly invested in the relationship.

7. Something just feels off

Our bodies pick up on manipulative behavior much quicker than our minds. As Nick Morgan writes:

“Your conscious mind is poor at reading body language, because evolution pushed that chore down to your unconscious mind, which is much larger and faster and can handle the job in nanoseconds, reacting to danger long before your conscious mind could. But you have a third ‘mind,’ literally in your gut.”

So when in doubt, pay attention to your gut. That uneasy feeling is there for a reason.

Don’t try to distract yourself from it by trying to rationalize your partner’s actions or constantly giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Love bombing isn’t a matter of being too affectionate and loving.

It’s an insidious manipulation strategy that will play out for as long as it takes for you to get emotionally attached. And that’s when the real show starts.