Lovebombing as a Crisis of Presence: A Theoretical Reframing Beyond Simulacra and Sentimentality

Monday, March 31, 2025

In mainstream psychological discourse, lovebombing is described as a manipulative tactic involving excessive displays of affection, used to gain control over another person. Yet, this term—flattened into diagnostic jargon—risks erasing the complexity of human intensity and the structural causes of emotional incoherence. The phenomenon attributed to “lovebombing” may in fact be the symptom of something deeper: an ontological failure to see the other as a subject, combined with an incapacity to remain grounded in presence, desire, and mutual recognition.

From my own experience, what is often called lovebombing does not stem from evil intent, but from a desperate and confused attempt to access connection without possessing the tools—or the lucidity—to engage with the real. It is a performance of intimacy rather than intimacy itself. This performance is compulsive, linear, and projectional: the other is consumed as a fruit of fantasy rather than encountered as a subject with a heartbeat, a silence, a rhythm of their own.

Linear Intimacy and the Myth of Gradualism

In my past connection with this man, I encountered this linear mode of relating. He sowed fragments of himself as if vulnerability was a ladder, to be climbed in fixed stages. But I do not function in a linear unfolding. I open from the center. I demand the real—immediate, unedited, unspectacular. This is why my connection with a peer in my ceramics class, intensified rapidly: he responded directly to my presence, not to a projection. We met in the present, not in the fantasy of what we could become.

Lovebombing, then, is not defined by intensity—but by dissonance. A dissonance between expression and presence, between the quantity of attention and the quality of recognition. The “bomb” is not love—it is a form of dislocated projection in which the other is not truly seen.

bell hooks and the Ethics of Presence

Bell Hooks reminds us in All About Love that love is not a feeling, but an action rooted in commitment, responsibility, and mutual recognition. In that sense, lovebombing fails precisely because it mimics the aesthetics of love without the substance of it. It becomes a simulacrum in the Baudrillardian sense: a copy with no original, a reproduction of what culture imagines love to be. The one who lovebombs does not meet the other—they perform “meetingness”.

To love is to stay. Not physically, but existentially—to stay with the discomfort, the slowness, the ambiguity of the other as subject. Most people do not have the nervous system, the breath, or the language to do that. So they compensate with excess. They overwhelm you not because they are malicious, but because they do not know how to remain with themselves. The result is still violence.

Byung-Chul Han and the Fatigue of the Self

Byung-Chul Han’s diagnosis of contemporary intimacy as marked by exhaustion and hyper-transparency is key here. In a society where everything must be available, shown, digitized, and emotionally capitalized, intensity becomes a commodity. Lovebombing emerges in a world where depth has been replaced by immediacy and affirmation. The bombardment of messages, affection, and pseudo-vulnerability is not about the other—it is about escaping one’s own emptiness.

Fanon and the Failure to See the Other

Frantz Fanon, though primarily concerned with colonial violence, offers a crucial insight: violence begins where recognition fails. When someone cannot recognize the other as a subject—not an idea, not a function, not a savior or mirror—they will inevitably become cruel. This cruelty is not always physical or explicit. It can be a withdrawal, a ghosting, a sudden flip into resentment once the projection collapses.

In lovebombing, the collapse is inevitable—because it was built on fantasy. When the real other appears—complex, slow, non-performative—the illusion implodes, and the one who lovebombed often retaliates with coldness, rejection, or indifference. They resent the real for not conforming to the imaginary.

Toward a Radical Ethics of Intensity

What we need is not less intensity—but a transformation of how we relate to it. True intensity is not a flood—it is a still gaze. A shared silence. A recognition that the other breathes on a different rhythm, and that love is not about drowning in each other but holding presence like a sacred object.

To de-pathologize intensity is not to excuse manipulation. But it is to understand that many people—especially in capitalist, patriarchal systems—have never been taught how to be with the other. They over-express because they cannot inhabit the pause. They need the fantasy because they fear the encounter. Lovebombing, then, is not excess—it is absence, masked as abundance.

And I refuse to be consumed.