Confessions of a love bombardier

by David Benjamin

“One partner, typically male but not exclusively, showers the other person with attention, affection, compliments, flattery, and essentially creates this context where she feels like she’s met her soul mate…”

— Chitra Raghavan, professor of psychology, John Jay College

MADISON, Wis. — Apparently, one can nowadays sexually harass someone remotely by means of “love bombs.” I’m a little fuzzy on how a guy proceeds to traumatize by tweet the object of his affection. It seems as though you have to overwhelm your inamorata with texts, videos, photos, podcasts and other techno-Valentines that constitute a relentless, inescapable insistence that I’m just a boy twiddling my iPhone (virtually) in front of a girl and asking her to love him. 

Or vice versa. Both guys and dolls can be love bombardiers, or — in the diagnosis of psychology prof Chitra Raghavan — narcissist pests.

Who, me?

Yeah.

When I read about the love-bomb trauma crisis—evidently exacerbated by dating apps—that seems to be sweeping the Web, I realized with a pang of guilty self-realization that I had spent much of my post-pubescent youth exhibiting analog symptoms of this predatory phenomenon. 

Not that I invented the love bomb.

From all indications, Cyrano’s raging crush on Roxanne and Romeo’s bellowing beneath balconies at all hours of the night were classic love-bomb missions, as were all those gushy letters between Bob and Elizabeth, the Barrett-Browning B-17 crew. 

My early love-bomb campaigns featured a barrage of poems, foisted relentlessly on the targeted girl. She would find them tucked surreptitiously into her purse or fluttering unexpectedly from between pages in her history text. I was not then—nor have I ever been—a good poet. But I was pathologically prolific, generating line after morbid line of heartsick supplication—no rhyme or simile of which ever succeeded in tickling the amorous fancy of the girl (or the next girl, or the one after that) in question. 

I had a singular talent for being gently dismissed. I would, of course, disperse as requested, but only long enough to write my next batch of lovelorn doggerel. Next day, the girl would open her chemistry lab book, find my scribbled verse tucked inside on blue-lined notepaper and mutter, “Oh God. Not again.”

I was a freshman in college for my most egregious amatory onslaught. My quarry was a blonde classmate whom I might as well call Juliet. She was pretty, not beautiful, but sufficiently winsome that—on orientation day—she was swiftly spotted and claimed by an upperclassman of the sort who had long since lost traction with any woman who’d been around campus for more than a semester. 

I snagged Juliet on the rebound from that inaugural Romeo. We enjoyed an interlude best described as puppy love. For a month or so, we strolled hand-in-hand around campus, did a little chaste kissing in the Illinois moonlight, related to each other our hopes, dreams and painfully short autobiographies. Our big date was a post-Christmas taxi ride into downtown Rockford to see a new movie, called The Graduate. We held hands in the dark and fell under the spell of a lovesick Benjamin desperately questing after a girl who had spurned him. 

A week or so later, as though inspired by Katharine Ross, Juliet spurned me. She had taken a trip to another campus (Hint: Never let your coed sweetie take a trip to another campus.) and met a guy whose name, as I recall, was Apple. 

“You fell in love with an Apple?” I asked incredulously.

Not being witty, she did not retort, “Yeah, and he’s Delicious!”

Juliet’s repartée deficit should have soured me on the spot and sent me looking for a new heartthrob. But, being a narcissist pest, I instead escalated my futile courtship. I started pumping out poems like a Hallmark factory. I also drafted to my cause other, better, poets — Keats, Herrick, Shelley, the Bard himself, e.e. cummings, of course, and even Ms. St. Vincent Millay. I conveyed all this drivel, doggerel and plagiarism—three, four, ten little once-folded love bombs a day—through the handy campus post office. She would unlock her mailbox and a torrent of unrequited passion would spill forth. I used, as my spy and go-between, Juliet’s roomie, Betsy, with whom I’d bonded platonically on my first day on campus and who regarded my siege of Juliet as good clean fun. Also, I think Betsy wished there was a boy in her life as smitten with her as was I over Juliet.

Jeez! Maybe she was jealous? Maybe I should have—

But never mind. 

Also complicit in my campaign was my wingman, Jody. Between classes, I would scan the passing throngs, hoping hungrily for a glimpse of the wan and disdainful Juliet. Once, intercepting her as she entered the Science Building. I made note of the weather, a gray pall of wintry gloom. She nodded reluctantly. Given the slightest cue, I quipped, “You’re the only sunshine we have today.”

From a subtle tremor in Juliet’s stoic demeanor, Jody could tell that this little Cupid’s arrow had hit the mark. As Juliet quickened her step and escaped, Jody chucked me on the arm and said, “Good one!”

Such were my victories. 

My last love-bomb was tickets to a Simon and Garfunkel concert at Northwestern University. If she’d had her wits about her, she would have begged off a long bus trip that would require sitting with me, enduring my redundant, tedious, pathetic entreaties to forsake Johnny Appleseed and harken back to me, her soulmate and her own—only—true love. But she couldn’t resist the allure of America’s foremost folk duo. So, we spent a hellish five or six hours together. Juliet remained adamantly silent, sighing frequently, cringing against the bus window, occasionally begging me to please, for one minute, shut the hell up. Simon and Garfunkel, at the pinnacle of their career, gave a splendid performance. The crowd was delirious. Juliet, assiduously ignoring me, hung on their every lyric. I was right there, but I missed the whole concert. 

After that night, I kept up my love-bombing, abusing Juliet’s mailbox and collecting intelligence from Betsy. My mission ended, finally, not with a bang but a semester. Juliet fled home to Crystal Lake, where I did not follow. By the time school reconvened, I was two girls later and Johnny Appleseed was a tiny dot in Juliet’s rearview.

I know that Betsy and Jody saw my feckless but oddly heroic wooing of Juliet as “romantic.” There were moments when Juliet’s demeanor suggested she was as flattered as she was irked by my feverish devotion. From Betsy, I learned that Juliet had saved all my notes, letters, odes, couplets and prayers.

Juliet had dumped me. In turn, I had surveilled and badgered her. We had done each other damage, but not enough to kill either of us—or even break the skin. Through it all, we were barely “lovers,” or even bombers. We were more like interns in the laboratory of love, swirling test tubes and peering at slides. In our two hours with Dustin Hoffman and Mrs. Robinson, we had probably learned more about love and grownup sex than we’d gleaned over the years from parents, peers, instruction manuals and magazines hidden under the mattress. 

Were we college kids today, one or both of us might deem ourselves victims of the other’s emotional cruelty. But that year, in that place, at our very worst, we were just an ardent boy and a hard-to-get blonde, feeling our way—melodramatically but not traumatically—through the tunnel of love.