Eleven days in, he has said he has never felt this way about anyone. There have been flowers at work, twice. He texts good morning before she is awake and good night after she has stopped replying. He has asked to meet her parents. He has mentioned, lightly, that he could see them living together by summer. Her friends say it is a lot. She says it is a lot, and that she has never been treated like this, and both statements are true.
"Love bombing" did not begin in psychology. It was the term used inside the Unification Church in the 1970s for the deliberate flooding of a new recruit with attention, affection and belonging. Margaret Singer, a clinical psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who interviewed hundreds of former cult members, described the practice in her 1995 book Cults in Our Midst as one of the standard opening moves of a high-control group: the recruit is surrounded, praised and made to feel chosen, before any demands are made.
From there the term migrated into writing about abusive relationships, where it now describes the intense early phase that survivors report before control begins. That migration happened mostly in books, blogs and therapy rooms, not in journals. It is worth being clear about that, because the term is now used with a confidence the literature has not earned.
The one paper that treats love bombing as a named construct and measures it is by Claire Strutzenberg and colleagues, published in 2017 in Discovery, the undergraduate research journal of the University of Arkansas's agricultural college. The authors built a short questionnaire, gave it to a sample of university students, and found that scores on it correlated with narcissistic traits and with insecure attachment.
That is a reasonable first step and an honest piece of student work. It is also a small, cross-sectional study in a non-peer-reviewed venue, using a scale that has not been validated elsewhere. It cannot show that love bombing predicts later abuse, because it did not follow anyone. It is cited in popular articles as though it were the definitive research on the subject. It is closer to the only research on the subject.
There is no clinical definition of love bombing, no entry for it in any diagnostic manual, and no agreed threshold that separates it from an intense but ordinary beginning.
Two adjacent literatures are much stronger, and between them they support a careful version of the popular claim.
The first is on narcissism in early relationships. Delroy Paulhus at the University of British Columbia showed in 1998 that people high in narcissism make a strong positive first impression in a new group and are rated as less likeable by the same people after several weeks of contact. Keith Campbell, Craig Foster and Eli Finkel reported in 2002 that narcissism was associated with a game-playing style of love, low commitment and an eye on alternatives, even while the relationship appeared to be going well. Campbell and Stacy Campbell drew the general picture in 2009: narcissistic traits pay off in what they called the emerging zone, the early days when charm and confidence are the whole story, and turn costly in the enduring zone, once a relationship needs reliability. An intense, flattering, fast-moving start followed by a cold, controlling middle is, on this evidence, what a relationship with a highly narcissistic partner tends to look like.
The second literature is on intermittent reward. Charles Ferster and B. F. Skinner's 1957 work on schedules of reinforcement established that behaviour rewarded unpredictably is more persistent, and harder to extinguish, than behaviour rewarded every time. Donald Dutton and Susan Painter applied this to abusive relationships in 1981 under the name traumatic bonding, arguing that the alternation of warmth and cruelty produces a stronger attachment than steady warmth would, and tested the idea with women leaving abusive partners in 1993. The early flood of affection matters in that account because it sets the reward the person will later keep trying to win back.
Put the strong literatures together and a defensible statement emerges. Highly narcissistic people tend to be intensely appealing at the start of relationships and worse later. Unpredictable affection produces stubborn attachment. An abuser who front-loads affection and then rations it is using a mechanism that is well documented in animals and people. None of this requires the term love bombing, and none of it establishes that a lavish beginning is, on its own, a warning sign. Most intense beginnings are just intense beginnings.
The useful markers come from the cult literature, where the practice was named. Singer's account puts the emphasis not on the quantity of affection but on what it is attached to: speed, exclusivity, and a demand for commitment that arrives before there is any basis for it. Evan Stark's 2007 description of coercive control makes the same distinction from the other end. The early phase matters because of what follows: isolation, rules, and the withdrawal of the affection whenever the rules are broken.