“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.