Love Bombing or Limerence?
She said he had love bombed her.
At the beginning, it had been so exciting. He was there at every turn. The intensity of their interactions felt almost too exciting. They spent hours on the phone. They could not get enough of each other. It was every cliché she could imagine. It even scared her. How could it feel like this so fast?
And then, eventually, it did not. The intensity dropped. He became less available. The hours on the phone disappeared. There was less hunger, that feeling that everything happening between them was breathless and urgent.
Looking back, she wondered if the beginning had been love bombing. Maybe. But there is another possibility.
John and Julie Gottman, who have studied couples for decades, describe the first phase of romantic love as limerence: obsession, fantasy, sexual excitement, intrusive thinking, fear of rejection, and famously bad judgment.
At the beginning, I am loving you with little knowledge. I am responding to who you actually are, but also to who I imagine you are, what I hope you are, what you seem capable of becoming, and what being with you makes me feel about myself.
Gottman describes limerence as involuntary and near obsessive, with strong sexual attraction and an overwhelming desire for reciprocation. We think about the other person constantly. We want to see them, touch them, talk to them. We interpret small gestures as enormously meaningful. We see everything through the bright light of possibility.
Seen from this angle, some of the behavior we now call love bombing starts to look familiar. The distinction matters, though. Love bombing, properly understood, involves manipulation or control. Limerence does not. Intensity alone cannot tell us which one we are looking at.
But then reality starts arriving.
I discover you are not endlessly fascinating. You discover that I am not endlessly accommodating. We have disagreements. Sex becomes less urgent. You do not answer every text within thirty seconds anymore. I stop wanting to spend every available moment with you. Suddenly there are children and dishes and work and somebody needs to organize life.
Something has unquestionably been lost. But something can also be gained: knowledge.
Early love contains huge projection. Terry Real calls this first stage “love without knowledge.” Then knowledge arrives, often with disappointment. The person we imagined gives way to the person who is actually there. Real calls what can eventually emerge on the other side “knowing love”: loving someone with knowledge of who they actually are, rather than the person created partly by our own longing.
We tend to assume that if the beginning was real, it should continue. But why?
The beginning is produced by entirely different psychological conditions: novelty, uncertainty, anticipation, idealization, and sexual discovery. As limerence fades, people can panic and conclude that something has gone wrong when the relationship may simply be entering another phase, one in which differences actually have to be confronted.
If human beings stayed in limerence indefinitely, society would not function. We would spend far too much time thinking about sex and connection and whether the other person was going to call.
Remember being a teenager and staring at the phone, hoping it would ring? Or holding it, trying to decide whether to make the call yourself? Everything felt like life or death. There was barely room for normal life inside all those obsessive thoughts. We tend to associate that intensity with youth, but talk to people who fall in love later in life and many describe exactly the same story.
Eventually, though, the person we are intoxicated by becomes someone we know. And that transition can be deeply disappointing. The person who wanted to spend every waking moment with us now wants an evening alone. The person who once hung on every word has heard the story before. The sexual urgency changes. The person who seemed infinitely generous turns out to have limits. The person who seemed unusually easygoing has needs and sensitivities we did not know existed.
This is where the story we tell ourselves becomes important. One possible story is that love has changed. Another is that the beginning was fraudulent. Love bombing gives us a ready made way to tell the second story.
He love bombed me. If we are using the term accurately, that already tells us something about what happened: the intensity was part of a manipulative dynamic aimed at creating dependence, influence, or control. The problem is that the intensity itself does not give us enough information to know that.
The pattern of an intense beginning followed by diminished intensity tells us what happened. It does not tell us why.
Maybe he loved the chase. Maybe uncertainty intensified his desire, and once the relationship became secure, some of that intensity disappeared. Maybe idealization could not survive greater knowledge of her. Maybe intimacy itself became threatening. Maybe he simply became less interested as he got to know her. Maybe this was the completely ordinary expiration of limerence. Or maybe the early intensity really was being used to secure attachment, dependence, or control.
Those are very different stories.
Calling it love bombing can make us feel as though we have solved the mystery when we have really only named the shape of it.
That does not mean we should excuse whatever comes next. Someone may sincerely create enormous intimacy and still be unable to sustain the kind of relationship that it seemed to promise. If someone repeatedly pursues people intensely and then withdraws once they become attached, that pattern matters. It can be painful and destabilizing whether or not it was intentional.
We sometimes use the language of love bombing to explain the gap between how someone loved us at the beginning and how they loved us later. But that gap does not necessarily mean the beginning was a lie. Something can have been completely real and still have been temporary.
It may be one of the central developmental problems of love. At first, we fall in love with someone we barely know. Then, if the relationship lasts, we have to find out whether we can love the person who is actually there, and whether they can love us once we are no longer held inside the bright light of possibility.
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