A dear friend and former colleague recently wrote to me about my blog post, “Love Bombing: How To Control Others With Love.”  He noted:

Your most recent blog was a reach coming  from you – not sure what made you write that – as always quite well thought out and on target and educational but did not seem like the usual “mike.”

I thought, “Hmm, this could be another subject for a blog post!”

For those interested, I thought I would share why I write what I write, and at the end of this post, I will tell you why I specifically wrote about Love Bombing.

First, I love to put thoughts on paper for the same reason that I love to teach.  It gives me a lot of pleasure (for whatever reason) to pass on information.  I remember that in my teaching days, I would try to organize a lecture so that the poorest student would understand it while still stimulating the best student.  For me, that was always an interesting challenge.  Putting something in writing has a secondary benefit for me; I understand the topic better.  I have to use my organizational skills to “put all of the pieces together” and present a flow of information where one idea connects to another.

Additionally, I like the idea of connecting different ideas that may seem unrelated to the reader in an effort to add some variety to what I’m writing.  It is my hope that the reader starts out thinking, “Why did he add that?” And in the end, they think, “Oh, that’s why!”  It is just more silliness on my part.

Different people process information in different ways.  Some people are splitters; they are great at splitting up information into different groups or categories.  I’m a glommer, and I tend to see similarities in things.  Everything seems to connect to everything else in my mind.  However, one of my favorite things to do is to compare things, which forces me to go from glomming to splitting.  I’m also constantly exploring how similar things are different and have been doing that my entire life.  In fact, when I was 4, I would collect pencils and do a “detailed analysis” of everything from the quality of the paint to the smoothness of the pencil’s lead.  Ha, I never said I was “normal.”  

So you have a person whose brain naturally gloms everything together who then enjoys splitting those groups apart. It feels natural to me, but it sounds strange when I put this process on paper.  

When I first started this blog, the purpose was to see how honest and revealing I could be in a public forum.  It was a proof of concept project for future work.  Then the blog then became a legacy project for my kids and grand kids.  It is still that, but after thousands of pages, it is evolving into a pleasure project.  I enjoy writing, and I have a secret hope that at least one person who reads my posts will benefit from it. 

When I was working, my time was extremely constrained, and any learning had to be focused on a purpose.  However, those constraints have been lifted from me, and I can now spend as much time on any topic as I choose.  You see some of that in my writing.  In one post, I may talk about the importance of healthy relationships; in the next post, I might discuss the physics of induction hobs.  Since I gain nothing financially from my posts, I have no need to build a following.  If that was my purpose, I would have focused on a particular area where I’m particularly knowledgeable, like psychology or photography.  I think that would get boring for me.  Keeping everything loosey goosey gives me the flexibility to want to keep on writing.  Does that make this a vanity project?  I don’t know, but who cares?

So now that all of these generalities have been covered, let’s do a deep dive into why I wrote about love bombing… and it all started with a YouTube video.

One day, a video appeared on my YouTube feed from a channel called “Catfished.”  In the video, a wife was asking for help to convince her husband that a supermodel porn star was not in love with him. I’m not going to be very PC here, but this was a very average-looking couple in their 50s.  In many ways, it seemed like the guy had hit the jackpot with his wife.  She was organized and was much more financially responsible than he was.  She seemed to be intelligent and had a genuine concern for him. It was clear that she was the driving force that kept the house afloat. In fact, I believe that the husband moved into her house. 

I would say that she was the better-looking of the two.  He looked somewhat disheveled, almost dirty, and clearly did not make his personal appearance a priority.  He had been trolling dating sites when he came upon his girlfriend, and they “instantly connected.”  She said all of the right things.  She showered him with attention, sexualized the conversation, and noted that they were “twins” and “soulmates.”  Then she started to ask him for money, which he willingly sent, much of it from the mutual accounts held with his wife (which is how the wife discovered what he was doing).  

The woman of his dreams was in her 20s, was drop-dead gorgeous, and her photos were highly eroticized.  He was very quick to toss his wife aside, noting that he never really loved her.  Yet, he continued to live at home and seemed to have zero problems cohabitating with his wife as she made his meals and did his laundry. 

The Catfished team came in and proved that his girlfriend was a scammer and, in fact, was a man posing to be a supermodel. The photos were stolen from the internet, and the images were taken from a porn star.  They even got the porn actress to video call the guy and tell him that she was not his girlfriend. He agreed to break off contact with the scammer, and (for whatever reason) his wife was willing to give him another chance.  However, the scammer continued to contact him and told him that the real actress was fake, and the guy believed it.  By then, the wife had had enough, and their relationship was over.  I have to wonder how long the scammer continued to contact him once his former wife closed the guy out of her bank accounts.  

When you watch one type of video, YouTube’s algorithm gives you more, and I watched them. They all had a similar tone.  Beautiful, successful, and rich fictional people professing their love (and requesting money) to very average-looking victims.  In some cases, the scammer destroyed a marriage; in other cases, they preyed on lonely single people who were convinced that they were being courted by A-level lovers. 

It was amazing how easily these people were able to be conned, some sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to their online “friends” with the promise that the most recent cash infusion would bring their internet lover into their arms. It was also clear that these scammers were using a defined playbook, as many of the plot lines were similar.  I was witnessing a mass scam that was taking cash from victims as easy as taking candy from a baby.  All using the simple technique of love bombing. 

This made me think of other institutionalized ways that people love bomb others in order to manipulate them, hence the references to grooming and the like.

However, this type of manipulation didn’t originate as a way to deliberately manipulate others; it originated on a one-to-one basis, and that was something that I was very familiar with in my psychiatric practice.  Hence, the paragraphs on love bombing and personality disorders.  

It made more organizational sense to start out with individuals, then look at individuals who were actively conning, and then the more “institutionalized” methods of love bombing, like the Catfished example. For me, it was a fun article to write.

So there you have it. Now you know how I pick topics and why they may seem so varied on the surface.  Like all of us, I’m not a one-trick pony, and since I don’t rely on my blog to generate income, I have the unmistakable pleasure of writing whatever I happen to be pondering at that moment.  A perfect way for me to write!

Peace

Mike