Let me set the scene. Someone is interested in me. They text — but not obsessively. They’re consistent — but not overwhelming. They tell me they’re a “slow burn” type.
And you know what I did? I dropped them.
Quickly. Decisively.
And with a level of offense that, in hindsight, I had absolutely no business feeling… or maybe I did, IDK.. He didn’t get a chance to prove my offense to be correct.
But I thought — who do they think they are? Making me work for it? Making me wonder? No, thank you. Next.
The problem wasn’t them. It was that I had been so thoroughly trained by love bombing that healthy love felt like indifference, perhaps?
What Love Bombing Actually Did to Me
In every relationship that conditioned me, it started the same way. Over-the-top gifts early, and consistently. Constant texting — like, always available, never a delayed response. (which, yes.. your time needs to revolve around me LOL) Grand romantic gestures before we even knew each other’s middle names. (Which wasn’t the worse because.. idk back then I didn’t care about all that kind of detail anyway) Being put on a pedestal and covered in compliments until I genuinely felt like the only woman on Earth.
And in that season? I felt untouchable. Wanted. Valued. Like the most important person in their entire universe.
It is genuinely one of the best feelings— and I won’t pretend otherwise. When someone makes you feel like you hung the moon before you’ve even had a hard conversation, that feeling is intoxicating.
But here’s what no one tells you about love bombing: what goes up, comes down.
When the intensity faded — and it always fades, because it was never sustainable — I didn’t experience it as things “settling into normal.” I experienced it as rejection. Like I had done something wrong. Like they were annoyed by my existence. Like I had lost something I didn’t know how to get back. The highs had been so extreme that anything less than that felt like a complete withdrawal of love, and frankly, a waste of my time.
That cycle broke something in me. Or maybe it built something in me — a dependency on intensity that I didn’t even realize I had.
So I started chasing the high…
Without fully understanding what had happened to me, I started to equate love bombing with being liked. With being chosen. With being worth it. So when someone showed up differently — calmly, consistently, without the theatrics — my nervous system read it as:
He’s not that interested.
This is boring.
I must not be enough for him to try harder.
None of that was true. But my brain had been rewired to only recognize love when it arrived loudly. Extravagantly. Like a performance.
Consistent, steady, real love felt like nothing. It felt like emptiness. And I would rather walk away from something healthy than sit in the discomfort of waiting for fireworks that weren’t coming.
The Truth I’m Still Learning to Sit With
I’m not on the other side of this. I’ll be honest — I’m in the messy middle. I recognize the pattern now, which is more than I could say a few years, hell even months ago. But recognizing it and rewiring it are two very different things.
What I know now is this: love bombing is not love. It’s a strategy — whether intentional or not — that creates dependency. It manufactures attachment by flooding your nervous system with dopamine, then pulling back and leaving you scrambling to get it again. It is, in every real sense, a cycle of emotional highs and withdrawal.
And when you’ve lived in that cycle long enough, calm starts to feel like cold. Consistency starts to feel like complacency. A person who texts you back in a few hours instead of immediately starts to feel like they don’t care.
That’s the damage. And it doesn’t heal just because you name it.
What I’m actively working on — slowly, imperfectly — is learning to tolerate the quiet. To not interpret someone’s steadiness as a lack of desire. To understand that not every relationship needs to open with fireworks to be worth staying for. That a person who shows up the same way on day three and day three hundred might be offering me something more real than anyone who swept me off my feet in week one ever did.
It’s a hard lesson. But I think I’m finally ready to learn it.
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