What is Love bombing?

Love bombing is a seductive tactic, where a manipulative person tries to control another individual with “bombs”,  from day one.

If you have someone declaring their undying love to you after only a couple of weeks, step back and ask yourself; ‘Am I about to be a victim of what it’s known as ‘love bombing’?

According to Dale Archer, a psychiatrist and author, love bombing is where you are showered with affection, gifts, and promises for the future, making you believe you may have discovered love at first sight. Someone is loving, caring, affectionate, and seems to just “get” you. Things progress really quickly, and you start to wonder whether this is what you’ve been missing all along.

Everything happens so quick, that the victim is left with little time to assess if they are being dubbed. Things take a turn when you start paying attention to other things in your life. Evidence of frustration and anger starts to show,  a side of them you didn’t see before. They will become mean and belittle you and they become emotionally and psychologically abusive. Love bombing is the reinforcement, where the abuser showers you with love if you act how they want you to.

Love bombers are manipulative people who hook up their victims by showering them with attention first. And then proceed to devalue them especially when they focus on other aspects of their life that are also important to them.

Archer makes a very good point, healthy relationships build up slowly and couples should maintain healthy friendships with friends and family.

Maintain friendships and family relationships, be outspoken about your needs and wants in a new relationship and always take it slow. Finally, remember to stop, look, and listen.

If you feel you are walking on eggshells and feel like you are losing your sense of self, it’s time to step back and cut off from the relationship.

Archer urges people to remember the advice: ‘If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.’

What is kittenfishing?

Is when dating app users embellish or inflate the truth to present themselves in a better light. Better than what they are in reality to try and draw in potential lovers. For example, saying they are a few centimetres taller than what they really are or lying about their age and deliberately using older pictures of themselves.

Most people are familiar with the trend, but dating app Hinge was the first to put a name to it. This is how they define the term:

Kittenfishing: the phenomenon of well-intentioned dating app users presenting themselves in an unrealistically positive light. A kittenfisher’s profile is often comprised of photos that are outdated, heavily-filtered, or strategically angled, text that has been ghost-written by a particularly witty friend, and height that has been rounded by more than two inches.

In trying to make themselves look more interesting than what they are, is a sure way to get things to a bad start were there to be a first real date.  So maybe just don’t lie on your dating app, it’s counter-intuitive for everyone involved.

‘Honesty is the best policy’

This still holds true in the modern world of dating. Nothing will come out of a lie, right from the beginning.