We have to stop using the term lovebombing

 We must retire the term lovebombing because it dangerously minimizes what is actually happening. The phrase sounds romantic, impulsive, even flattering, as if the harm comes from excess affection rather than calculated deception. That framing softens the perpetrator’s intent and subtly shifts responsibility onto the victim, implying they were swept away by love instead of systematically targeted. Language matters because language shapes accountability, and lovebombing is linguistic cover for a much more serious violation.

What is being described is not love at all, it is constructive fraud of intimacy. As explained in Voiceless No More: The Legal War on Narcissistic Abuse, this behavior involves the deliberate misrepresentation of emotional availability, commitment, and identity in order to secure trust, attachment, and psychological access. The abuser presents a fabricated self, offers counterfeit intimacy, and induces reliance under false pretenses. That meets the core elements of fraud, intent, deception, reliance, and harm, except the commodity being stolen is psychological safety and relational consent.

Calling this conduct lovebombing obscures the absence of informed consent. Real intimacy requires truth, reciprocity, and continuity. Constructive fraud of intimacy is designed to collapse boundaries quickly so the victim cannot assess reality before dependency forms. The speed is not passion, it is strategy. The intensity is not connection, it is leverage. Once attachment is secured, the terms change, affection is withdrawn, reality is rewritten, and the victim is left trying to earn back something that never truly existed.

Retiring the term lovebombing is not semantic nitpicking, it is a corrective act. Survivors were not overwhelmed by love, they were deceived by a false emotional contract. Naming this behavior accurately restores dignity to victims and strips perpetrators of the romanticized language that shields their actions from scrutiny. When we call it what it is, constructive fraud of intimacy, we move the conversation out of pop psychology and into ethical and legal clarity, where it belongs.