Love Bomb You're My Love Bomb

**Although all of this information is true and factual I have had to skew a few of the details in order to protect some innocent people.

Love bombing; unfortunately it’s not as beautiful and romantic as it sounds, although it could be if it wasn’t so evil and contrived.

Love bombing is your “welcome into phase one; Idealization or as some call it Idolization”. This is the phase where they draw you in.  Where they convince you that your connection with them is real and all empowering and that you need each other.

Here are a few things I wrote in the first months of my relationship:

“I currently have someone in my life who makes me smile every day.  Who makes me feel worthy of being adored”

“My Mr. Happy is coming tomorrow.  He always makes life seem so much better, I love spending time with him.  Time with him feels natural, peaceful, good and right”

“He told me he was falling in love with me! It makes me feel so good to be with someone who loves all of me, even my crazy”

It started with this undeniable connection.  The connection him and I had was very important to him.  He wanted me to know that he had never in his life connected with someone the way he had connected with me and that we found each other at the right time in our life.

We had many of the same interests, we liked the same songs, we both lost a sibling to cancer, we both had issues with our fathers (this is called mirroring).  We were kismet-meant to be.

He was my sunshine on a cloudy day.

He would look at me with this huge smile on his face and tell me that when he was with me it made him want to celebrate. That for the first time in a long time he felt joy.  He wanted to know everything there was to know about me.  He would ask me so many questions and intently listen to the answer, prodding for a better answer if he thought mine was too flippant.

No man had ever wanted to take the time to know who I was.  It was so strange meeting this person who wanted to know me.  I was so guarded at first; this concept of sharing my realness with someone was so foreign to me, but very quickly my walls came down, my guard softened.

Even though he lived in a different city he would call me every day.  He would call me during the day to see how my day was going and he’d call me at night. It got to the point where I depended on him telling me ‘Good Night’ in order to have a restful sleep.  I looked forward to every single phone call, they would make my day.

I walked around with a smile plastered on my face from morning until night.  I thought ‘wow finally!  I just had to get through all this shit in order to find something good!  Finally being a good and genuine person has paid off for me”. 

He used to call me baby. I remember thinking that it didn’t sound cheesy at all when he said it.  “Hi Baby, I’m thinking about you Baby, Good night Baby” and yes I hear the cheese as I write, but I thought it was so genuine; too good to be true!

He would call me Eggie because I once had told him that my grandmother who I most closely resembled was named Agnes or Aggie; he thought that was very funny and along with the names “Chicken Little” and “My Country Mouse” it became a bit of a pet name.  I loved all of it I mean I was a girl who spent her whole life thus far just wanting someone to appreciate and love her for who she was; every girl wants that. 

For the first time in my life I was being showered with attention and affection.  He told me I was sexy and funny and smart; he told me how I was different than anyone else he had ever met, for the first time in his life he’d met a woman he could tell his deepest darkest secrets too, he never had before, not even to his ex-wife. 

He just couldn’t get enough of me it seemed and he was always giving me these wonderful compliments that at first were so hard for me to accept, but later became something that I looked forward to.  Not to sound cliché but he had become quite literally the wind beneath my wings.  I ran faster and longer and I was so happy all of the time.  I embraced myself for the first time ever; I really liked who I was. He told me he was drawn to me like a moth to a flame.

He also made an effort when it came to me, no one had ever bothered to do that before.

 I remember the first trip he ever took me on.  At first it was disconcerting because he wouldn’t tell me where we were going or even really what I had to pack.  He would call me and tell me what I should bring and I would write it all down and then he’d call me the next day and tell me I had to bring something completely different.  Because I had always in the past been the one in charge of planning everything and anything it made me a little OCD but at the same time I felt like a schoolgirl.  I felt like all of the love I’d missed in my life thus far was happening now and that although I was forty years old already, it was well worth the wait.

This first trip was really special.  I remember feeling so nauseous like I was going on a first date.  We had never gone away together before.  He picked me up at the airport and the whole ride there was a surprise.  When we got to our destination I realized he was taking me fishing. I was so excited, I grew up fishing!  Fishing reminded me of my father and my brother. This was a passion of his and he said he’d never shared it with another woman before.  He told me that fishing was something he did to escape from life and that there was no reason to escape from me.  He wanted me to be a part of it.

He had rented a yurt, which was a very fun experience.  Knowing that I wasn’t really a camper I was flattered by this.  I was also blown away by everything he had done in preparation.  He had my favourite drinks and special snacks; he brought fluffy toiled paper and wet wipes for the outhouse; he created a music play list of all of the songs we liked to listen to together and many more.

Honestly, it was surreal (and it was).

We spent our days fishing and our nights by the campfire getting drunk on love and wine.

Over the course of the next six months or so we took several other mini-trips and each one was special in that he showed how much he loved me through the effort and detail he put forth.

On another trip he told me that all I needed to worry about was bringing a sundress.  Today, even now when I see a sundress in the store I am reminded of this trip but now with bittersweet memories.  We went white water rafting which was amazing and because there was a fire ban he had purchased an electric fire pit so we wouldn’t have to go without.  The sundress? Well the night after our white water rafting adventure we watched some live music and danced and drank under the stars.

Life couldn’t have been any better.  I was completely fulfilled and happy.

It was around this time that we started to talk about me moving to his city; trying to secure a job there.  We even talked about places where I might like to move within the city and companies that I might like to work for.  I even went on a few interviews to these places. 

My marital home was under renovation and would soon be up for sale; depending on how much money I made from the profits of selling that home I could possibly buy a house there. Perhaps I could buy a house and he could rent it off me until I was able to move there. He thought that was a great idea. Right now his living conditions were unbearable according to him, although he’d been separated from his wife for several years there was no way he could afford to move out and support two households; he needed to make more money.

In retrospect this was a huge red flag, but I had no reason to doubt him.  All of his free time was spent with me after all and people that we both knew and were friends with validated this story. 

I had been in a car accident and he suggested the car I should buy; I thought this was cute.  When he’d come to town he’d call it ‘his car’.  Looking back, especially given the type of person I am there are a lot of ‘why’s’ that I ask myself.  How did I not see this?  That is a very big part of recovering from narcissistic abuse; the whys.

He told me that he was attracted to my independence.  That he found my tenacity, drive and success extremely sexy.  He would ask me questions about my investments and my retirement savings and he would ask these questions like he admired me for this. I didn’t feel strange at the time that he was asking as it just seemed a natural progression in our relationship.

My narcissist appeared to be a doting father.  He would take his son to play rugby every weekend.  He was really good at rugby and had been offered a scholarship.  He was so proud of this.  On the day his child decided to quit it was as though his world came crashing down.  It was another little red flag.  I didn’t understand the attachment and I didn’t understand why he couldn’t grasp that perhaps his child wanted to do something different with his life.  He seemed depressed about it off and on and he would bring it up in the quiet moments.  He had said once that he felt that this ex-wife had encouraged their child to quit because she knew how much he enjoyed going.

My own daughter is in competitive dance.  Even though he had not met my daughter (thankfully) he would talk about how he couldn’t attend a dance competition but IF I put her in rugby he would definitely come and watch.  He even asked questions about her overall physical stamina and thought that she would probably make a great rugby player.  At the time I thought that this was just banter back and forth and that he just really missed attending these games, but he talked about it for a long time.  I hate to admit it but I asked my daughter if she would be interested in trying this sport, thankfully she wasn’t.

When you grow up without a father figure the idealization of men in general is sometimes skewed.  You tend to romanticize men and even though I had given up on them I realized that I was probably out to lunch as far as my expectations went so when he came along that vulnerability, that need for affection and for love was written all over my face.  I was standing there on the edge of that damn cliff and I was saying “over here! Come and love me, come and save me” and someone did. 

The past six months were everything that any woman would ever dream of.  Red flags seemed ridiculously out of place; it was time to stop being a cynic about love and let this happen.  It was time to let go of all the fear, insecurity and mistrust because this guy was the real deal; I wanted to grow old with him.

I had finally found true love.