We really believe it. They come out of nowhere, jump into our lives, and then they are the only thing we can think about. They overwhelm our emotional kaleidoscope, and their color is the only one we can see. Love-bombing seems the natural reaction.
Everything becomes unbearably meaningful. The quality of the air seems to change. The sun is more vivid and its crystalline light makes everything shining and incandescent. Sentimental music is oddly personal, and your physical sensations, the very act of being alive, is a state of ecstasy—provided they are paying attention to you.
A simple text message, or the lack thereof, can mean the difference between euphoria and emotional annihilation. You go back and forth between sublime repose, overwhelmed with placid gratitude, and then a sense of urgency to take advantage of every fleeting moment—to grab the object of your affection and hang onto it for dear life.
If the loss of a romantic partner or friend or parent ever destroyed you, or you grew up in a place where you never felt accepted or safe, you may deeply long for the companionship that you either lost or never had.
You crave that full feeling. The feeling of safety. The relief that comes when you find someone to patch over the hole deep within you. Falling in “love” is the most mind-altering, intoxicating experience that life has to offer. For the soft codependent, meeting “the one” is the experience of life.
You love the new feeling of warmth. You love the new hope for the future. You love them, and you need them to know it. You need to inspire in them the same feelings that they have inspired in you. You are at peak mental function and creativity, the best version of yourself.
Then you realize you would never be the same without them, and the terror hits. You would walk the earth a living dead if you let them slip away. You need their attention like your lungs need air because you finally found your soul mate. So you do the only reasonable thing a person can do, and start a bombing campaign.
Love-bombing is typically expressed with four behaviors: gifts, gestures, confessions, and escalations. Gifts are usually expensive or highly sentimental and are designed to get emotional responses from the recipient, secure feelings of gratitude or indebtedness, and achieve positive attention.
Gestures can be compliments, initiating lots of physical contact, and trips, events, or dates that showcase tremendous thought for the love-object’s desire, preference, and pleasure.
Confessions are moments of high vulnerability in which the smitten divulge deeply personal feelings to the love-object. “I think you’re really special.” “I’ve never felt this way before.” “I think I’m falling for you.” “Breaking up with you was the worst mistake of my life.”
These elements work together for the single goal of achieving confirmation. Confirmation in exchange for gifts, gestures, confessions, and escalations from a love-object is a transaction that results in an overpowering illusion of safety.
Confirmation is the real-life experience of the ultimate fantasy coming true. It is a critical rush of dopamine, a dose of cocaine generated by your own mind (Fisher et al, 2016), with a hot flash of oxytocin on the side. Confirmation is what gives the words “boyfriend”, “wife”, “married”, and “partner” the unmatched power to inspire the ultimate sense of security in your emotional universe.
The suspense, excitement, and anticipation involved in waiting for the next date—surprising them with flowers, tickets to the opera, a diamond ring, a love note taped to their vanity mirror, breakfast in bed, giving oral sex multiple times a day, withholding orgasm to give them all they can take—all leads up to and confirms the sincerity behind your confessions. They are the moments when you lay your heart bare, expose the terrifying void in your soul, and admit that everything you do is because you love them. It works even better with a tear in the eye, two if possible.
If they turn red and confess that they love you, too, your love-bombing campaign will have earned essential confirmation. Human bonding. It is the ultimate euphoric event, one that codependents do not manage casually, and to which codependents are often addicted.
After confirmation, the unending final phase of escalation begins. After she holds your hand, you want to hold it longer. After he puts his head on your shoulder, you want to enjoy that feeling all night while you sleep. After you have sex, you want to have it again, but after a fancy meal, a romantic walk, a surprise gift, and a few deep confessions.
Admitting to friends that you are dating is a huge rush. Even bigger when you tell your family. Then you get your tests, birth control, and you can have sex naturally and without any barriers while you whisper lovely confessions into each other’s ear. Then you get engaged, married, and have kids. You arrive, loving family intact, the ultimate reward, and are confirmed. That’s the fantasy, anyway.
The difference between healthy romance and codependent behaviors can be measured by their intention, compulsiveness, and tolerance for denial. When the love-bombed partner hesitates, the vertigo can be overwhelming. Any stagnation in the escalating events in the previous paragraph can trigger feelings of tremendous insecurity, doubt, and rumination. Outright rejection can put a codependent in bed for days.
Even when the love-object does reciprocate, there is a saturation point where pleasing can no longer reciprocate with confirmation of equal intensity to your effort. Cracks crawl quickly across the codependent’s glass ego, and the fallout isn’t pretty.
Do you have to text “I love you” fifty times a day? Or do you compulsively ask if your partner is okay? And how many minutes of silence can you tolerate before you are no longer able to eat or function at your job? Do you require them to immediately participate in the next stage of relationship escalation? What is your response if they need some time to think, be with themselves, or simply refuse to accommodate you?
The demands of compulsive love-bombing require someone to deliver you a hit of confirmation as though they were your personal cocaine dispenser. It can happen at the beginning of a relationship and deep in a decades-long marriage. You aren’t really doing it for them anymore. You are strung out, empty inside, desperate for meaning in life. You have regressed to exactly who you were before the relationship—a doubt machine that runs on insecurities.
Trauma, as will be mentioned later, often freezes people in their development. If your dad went off to get cigarettes and never came back, the part of you that suffered the pain of that absence may stay the same age for a very long time. You might spend your whole life trying to explain it to yourself, filling the void with romantic conquests, wondering who you might have been with a stable father figure, and who else you might have ended up falling in love with.
Maybe you were forced to move across the country at a critical moment in your upbringing and now you are overcome by adolescent rage every time you feel like your needs are being sidelined.
Trauma activates our most basic instincts and reduces our complex capabilities into singular, unconscious reactions. In codependency, instead of doubt or rage, you people-please in the pursuit of control. When you meet someone who triggers your trauma, love-bombing and confirmation seeking is often the compulsive result. That is, of course, if you are a soft codependent.
A hard codependent will engage in the exact same behaviors and do so for the exact same reasons—insecurity, arousal, and fear—but they do so consciously. Romantic love is much more terrifying for them. Instead of acting on romantic impulse, their love-bombing campaigns are calculated, manipulative, intentional onslaughts designed to hook someone’s affection and loyalty as quickly and completely as possible.
Rather than trying to express an inner longing and appreciation, they are consciously providing heavy attention with the sole goal of obtaining power over someone. Once they have it, they often withdraw to test the target’s level of attention to their moods and, more than anything, keep them good and insecure. They are training a compliant, dependable source of confirmation.
This is a classic for pickup artists whose only intention is to have sex with you and then disappear until they “need” you again. It’s not unheard of for a young, attractive woman to descend upon an unsuspecting man, marry him, and then divorce him with half his fortune. Bosses who like to do things under the radar sometimes love-bomb new, gullible employees with compliments and promises of promotion, only to destroy them during evaluations and tell them they need to try harder if they want to keep their jobs.
The most malignant of them all are those who swoop into a recently divorced single parent’s life, get them addicted to their confirmation, and abuse their lover’s kids out of spite, jealousy, and need for undivided attention and devotion. This is not rumor or isolated incidents; children are far more likely to be abused by a step-parent than a biological one. No codependent parent alive would ever believe that their “one and only” was abusing their child, and would rather punish an accusation or sever contact with their only flesh and blood than face reality.
A soft codependent often finds themselves in relationships with insecure people who they want to nurture and lift up. A hard codependent actively seeks out emotionally vulnerable targets, covertly crushes whatever self-esteem they have left, and grooms them to be wholly dependent on their personal confirmation.
They isolate the fragile person from their friends, family, coworkers, and punish them for having relationships in which they are not included. The target is the one piece of security, the one guarantee in the hard codependent’s life that they will never be abandoned, and they have no scruples about destroying any relationship that gets in the way.
This may sound a little heavy-handed, but it is far from fiction. The hard codependent’s intentions behind love-bombing are consistent with the behavior of several personality disorders. Hard codependent parents can love-bomb their children to compete with the other parent for affection, especially after divorce.
Once they have the child under their thumb, they return to the withdrawn tyrant who controls the household with their omnipresent willingness to explode. Their mercurial behavior has one single design, and that is to provoke you into asking, “Are you okay?” “What’s wrong?” “What did I do?” “What can I do?”
After that, they are in control, and you are in full codependent mode. When their insecurities are provoked again, the result will be another cycle of explosion, withdrawal, and love-bombing. Whole relationships with children, parents, and partners, can consist of this cycle for decades.
Confessions are often the most powerful tool in a hard codependent’s takeover toolbox. Once they choose a target—the kind of person who can’t say “no,” who looks for the best in everyone, and who treasures honesty and vulnerability—they might confess deeply personal information to hook and anchor them into their emotional world. If the target tries to back away or draw a boundary, those confessions become a warhead.
“But I told you about my child abuse!” “How dare you ask me to leave after I told you I slept with a professor in exchange for better grades!” “But, you know nobody likes me and I’m all alone!” “But I told you I loved you!” These are thermonuclear “pity me” statements designed to exploit your empathetic weaknesses. If Chihuahuas could talk, this is all they would say after trying to bite you.
Love-bombing is a slippery slope. The soft codependent expressing honest, unmoderated affection for someone is different from a hard codependent trying to gain control over someone’s soul. But the actions are often identical. Therefore, it is imperative to maintain awareness of the outcome we expect from our actions, whether they are being reciprocated, and what our intentions are.
Are your gifts compulsive? Do your gestures for others heal you somehow? Are your confessions really offering something, or are you trying to get something? Does your need for escalation contribute to your happiness? Someone else’s?
If we act to protect ourselves from pain, then we aren’t being generous, nor are we celebrating someone we love. If you marry someone because they make your pain bearable, but you end up healing it later on, what will become of the relationship?
When we do not work on resolving our own suffering, we will make others suffer, especially when a new love-object seems to have solved all our problems. The only difference between a soft and hard codependent is bitterness and beliefs about whether other people’s feelings have any importance. So beware: a good heart can always harden, but rarely does it go the other way.