Dr Anni Gethin, lawyer and executive director of the Brigid Project, a survivor-run support and advocacy group, suggests a young person who thinks they might be being love bombed, and wants to know whether its toxic or not, should “slow things down a bit, make sure [they are] … still seeing their friends and see how the love bomber reacts. If they respond angrily, punitively, possessively, or manipulatively then there is reason to be concerned.” The control starts, Gethin says, when they cannot “cope with their partner having their own life”.
Love bombing is an inundation of gestures and communication that seems dripping in unconditional love but, in fact, creates two very dangerous precedents. The first is control – love bombing can include things (especially for teenagers who know how to do this stuff) like sharing locations with each other on Find my Friends, or constant check-ins that inevitably lead to one person knowing every movement of the other.
The second thing love bombing creates is a data point of “when things were good”. As relationships become more controlling, or the victim becomes more isolated from their village, they look back on the love bombing to say “it used to be really good, so it can be like that again”. The trick, however, is that love bombing was the set-up.
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Love bombing is really hard to identify and probably for that reason does not get the attention it deserves. You are more likely to find memes and Instagram Reels from relationship experts about the opposite end of attention – when someone is not into you. In their conversations with friends, teenage girls are not likely to talk about someone being “too into them”; it is far more likely they will want to group analyse being left on “read”, ie where they can see on their phone their love interest has got their message but isn’t replying.
If you are a young person not used to getting affection from a peer, and in whose circle negging – or put downs, the adult equivalent of throwing sand in someone’s face in the playground as some form of flirting (it’s not, just stop doing it) – is the norm, it can feel that someone who is REALLY into you is the only “good guy” left.
Love bombing makes you respond to that attention rather than follow your own instincts. It is in grand gestures, big plans, great statements and an easy folding into each other’s lives.
How you talk to a teenager about this is difficult because love bombing – not real love – is basically all they see on the shows and hear in songs, but you need to talk to your teen about it and about coercive control, about why it is being criminalised, and about the difference between an argument and domestic violence. Even the RACGP had to spell that out for GPs to understand because it is such a complex and difficult topic.
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More than that, ask about their experiences. Do they know people who have really clingy partners? Do they feel the need to love bomb someone, to be generous in order to keep them? How do they see power dynamics play out in friendship groups, in relationships? They are closer to this than we give them credit for.
Make sure your teen has a village around them, whether it be with aunts or uncles (an increasingly rare commodity as birth rates dwindle), family friends, their own friends, friends’ parents, whoever. Because the more of a village a teenager has around them, the better it is for their sense of self and resilience. And the more people around them, the harder it is to isolate them.
Isolating a victim is the next step; it makes the perpetrator the victims’ whole world. Keep an eye out for it. Maybe you hear your teen say their partner doesn’t like their friends, or that they aren’t seeing their mates as much. But, it usually starts with an overabundance of affection that disorients.
Daisy Turnbull is a teacher and author. Her second book 50 Questions to Ask Your Teens comes out in February 2022.
The talk every parent should have with their teen: what is love bombing?
Source: Philippines Alive
