PhronesisLove bombing — the relational pattern of overwhelming a partner with excessive affection, attention, gifts, and validation in the early stages of a relationship — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_LB in the landscape of calibrated relational depth. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as calibrated relational depth: genuine intimacy developed through gradual, reciprocal, evidence-based deepening proportionate to actual shared experience and demonstrated trustworthiness.
W_LB is constituted by the intensity-as-depth confusion: overwhelming attention and affection activate attachment and bonding systems similarly to how genuine deep connection does, manufacturing a felt sense of exceptional connection before evidence supports it. Two subtypes are distinguished: instrumental love bombing (a deliberate strategy to manufacture dependency, used by coercive controllers) and anxious love bombing (driven by the perpetrator's own attachment anxiety, often unconscious).
The devaluation trap is the central clinical consequence: because the recipient's attachment was manufactured against unverified investment, the subsequent withdrawal or devaluation phase is experienced as catastrophic loss disproportionate to actual relationship depth. Nine formal propositions characterize the intensity-as-depth confusion, the two subtypes, manufactured attachment architecture, the devaluation trap, isolation as basin deepener, oxytocin bonding under manufactured intensity, anxious attachment as vulnerability, the distinction from genuine passionate early love, and return paths through deliberate pacing and calibrated vulnerability.