When leaders love bomb

How is election time like dating?

Trigger warning: this article contains references to exploitative behaviours

George Clooney in The Ides of March (acting a part)

Susan Bordo’s recent article, The Salesman and the Trickster set me on a train of thought which was too long for a comment: We think of love bombing as something to look out for on a first date. But are politicians learning to love bomb us? Or more likely, are we increasingly choosing those leaders who love bomb? If so, does it matter? I’m going to start with why it matters on a first date.

Love bombing is “the continuous bombing of a person with flattery, compliments, and affection”. The problem with love bombing is that it is a kind of mask – not a true reflection of the person’s behaviour or intentions, and this mask is often found to cover over undesirable qualities or a pattern of narcissistic behaviour that is neglectful or exploitative. I will call the non-love bomber in the relationship the victim. Of course, they are not a victim if they read the alarm bells correctly and walk away. Tolerating this kind of disappointment is part of what success in dating looks like.

On first sight, love bombing is not what we see in our politicians. But there are two flags that this might not be a dead-end question. The first is in Jason Frowley’s article last week about how we look for qualities in our leaders that are sometimes features of psychopathy. Some of these psychopathic features we find in the most prominent presidents, are also part of narcissism: grandiosity, charm and poor empathy.

Narcissism author Alexander Lowen writes about these qualities in the narcissistic leader, referring to the mask or persona as the ‘image’:

“Let us return to the example of an imposter…his acting is convincing because he has become convinced. He identifies with his image, and this becomes his only reality; he no longer senses that he is distorting or denying the truth. In a sense, he denies or ignores the reality of his being, but the denial is no longer deliberate or conscious. The actor has become so identified with his role or pose that it has become real for him.”¹

So, if our future leader is trying to win us over at election time, and s/he is narcissistic or even psychopathic, why wouldn’t s/he use love bombing as a way to do this?

The second flag that love bombing might not be irrelevant to a leadership contest, comes from zooming out a little and asking how love bombing works. On a dating level, it looks like compliments, gifts, promises and expressions of passion. What is the function of these behaviours?

We can be confident that the love bomber represents something ideal. If it works, the victim is impressed, hopeful and pleased. They have found someone who makes them feel what they want to feel: more special and more admired than on other dates. There will be a reason this is important to the victim. Perhaps dating has dried up. Perhaps they recently turned 35 and they were feeling sad about the kind of guys that were taking interest. If the regaining of power, self worth, and a sense of security is important enough to the victim, the love bomber who is too good to be true, will gain their full attention. There is another way to put this: the love bomber has the victim’s full attention because they cannot afford to accept the difficult and vulnerable feelings of disappointment or even ordinariness.

Now here is this 30-year-old stunner and he’s really interested. Their luck is turning. Also, this date values what they value. He’s concerned about their concerns. They responded to the quirky TikTok post and wanted to meet up. It’s almost too good to be true. These hopes and dreams that the victim was starting to grieve are suddenly alive again. They won’t need to lower their expectations. They are one of the special ones, and like a gambler holding out for a payout, they believe they will finally get to their goals. There are two problems with this:  One is that the love bombing is a promise of a level of care and consideration that cannot last. The other is that all along, the victim needed to base their sense of uniqueness and value on who they really were – including their vulnerable feelings. External evidence and grand gestures will never fully replace self-worth (see Elizabeth Taylor post as an example).

How does love bombing work for the love bomber? For the love bomber, the strategy works because it takes place in a vacuum. The behaviour cannot be sustained, and in order to work, the victim cannot know too much about the love bomber’s history of behaviour and in particular, their history of relationships. Post modern dating app situations are perfect. Long distance is ideal. What the love bomber is enjoying, is being, for a time, ideal, admired, valued and special. They are also managing to avoid bringing their own vulnerability to the restaurant table. The love bomber has a need to stay far from the risk of rejection. This is their M.O. And his date likes it. Every single time. Part of him knows that he cannot keep this up, but if he meets someone special enough, he thinks maybe he can. Or in rarer cases it’s a planned financial con trick. He will phone you in tears, after a shock disaster has occurred, in precisely three weeks’ time.

So, what advice should we give the potential victim on a first date? I once had to design some training about risk assessment for professionals working with people with personality disorder. With my colleagues (hi Lee, Alan and Kirsty), I sat down, and we tried to come up with a game. We asked ourselves, in what kind of common situation do people have to rely on risk assessment skills to predict the future behaviour of another person? We came up with ‘Risky Business: A Dating Game’. In the dating app and on the first date, we all have to put to use our risk assessment skills. We have to ask the right questions. These might be checking for:

1.     Idealisation: Do they promise something better than we could ever have hoped for? For example, will we never be disappointed again that we reached 35 without settling down? With their plans, do they imply that together, you will be wealthier than you had hoped?

2.     Inconsistency: Check for consistency between how they appear now and how they have been in the recent past. If others have reacted badly to them, are they able to explain this?

3.     Bad/ immature behaviour: Past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour. How has the person behaved towards others? Have they got into trouble? How recently? How serious were the outcomes of past mistakes? Most importantly, how has this kind of relationship gone in the past?

4.     Avoidance of vulnerability: How in control of the conversation does this person need to be? Are they sharing as much about themselves as you are? Are they able to reveal emotional vulnerability tied to real events? If relationships have gone badly, do they describe the other person as all bad? Can they accept any responsibility? Does the conversation get moved on – either by them or by you?

On their own, these qualities are not always ‘stop contact now’ flags, although if you have a pattern of picking badly behaved partners they might be. Usually, they should trigger further investigation: a mental note to come back to the topic.

When we look at these ‘anti-love bomb’ risk assessment questions, they look a bit more relevant to the person standing at the podium in a leadership debate. We choose our politicians not for romance. But we do invest in them a hope of being cared for. (Actually, I think we would do better in our dating, to look for someone that can care for us, than the Valentino, but that’s a different article). Leadership love bombing promises that we won’t have to carry any further the disappointments that we have had to tolerate. It promises that we will be lifted above the place we have found ourselves in. It promises us a sense of power that we were struggling with losing. But these promises are ultimately promises of feelings – happiness, confidence, hope, relief even. There is nothing wrong with looking for these feelings. But the promise that politics will bring them to us from a distance, is usually an empty one. It is usually a kind of love bomb.

The potential consequences of poor risk assessment on the date are not difficult to list. The painful confidence-sapping relationship that takes too long to escape from. Time for emotional recovery. Financial loss. Criminal proceedings. In extreme cases, time in prison for collusion. And the consequences in politics? What happens if the person behind the podium is voted in, and they turn out to be the person that their past behaviour, and not their podium behaviour, predicted? It may be that politicians who do zero love bombing at election time are rare. Perhaps there are degrees of love bombing. In democracy, it is the whole country that sits at the table, wiping their mouth with their napkin, taking another sip of their drink, listening, asking questions.

Disclaimer: All views expressed are my own unless otherwise stated, and do not necessarily reflect the views of any institution I have been employed by. The content here is for information and should not be interpreted as advice.

1. Lowen, A. (1997). Narcissism. Denial of the True Self. Touchstone.