Colloquially speaking,“love bombing” is a coercive outpouring of support. Marketing teams love bomb customers. Politicians love bomb voters. Sirens love bomb sailors.
But sociologists reserve the term for exhibitions of unconditional acceptance geared toward indoctrination. Military recruiters, for instance, might love bomb a potential recruit—first by emphasizing the military’s exclusivity, then by asking questions that presumably speak to the newcomer’s idealized self-image, implying that he is one of few eligible to join.
The recruiter says, “You can’t be in the military unless you’re very, very strong—like Hercules.” And then, “How long have you had such enormous and impressive muscles attached to your body?”
Cults do it, too. And like any organization eager to enlist worshippers, certain religious groups (especially historically young religions, such as Scientology, born-again Evangelicalism, or Mormonism, whose very existence depends on conversion) will love bomb probable converts by exaggerating similarities between the group and the other, always in a way that promises acceptance and forthcoming exaltation.
In general, such tactics work best on the lonely.
*
I had never been lonelier. I lived alone, had very few friends, and worked seventy hours a week, for very little money, under the management of a physically affectionate boss named Wally, who occasionally wept in front of me about strained relations with his wife.
Our company was Wally’s brainchild. He’d pitched it to investors as “a newspaper website (a newspaper, except it’s only online),” during a time when newspapers already had websites. His underlings included one full-time employee (me) as well as seven very exhausted, unpaid interns, who I assume (and hope) were independently wealthy because they all went to Sarah Lawrence, which is the most expensive college in the world. We were in a recession. Since graduating college, nearly everyone I knew had already been fired at least once. But acquiring hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans was often as easy as clicking a button that read, “I accept my award!” I felt lucky to have a job.
In general, the interns and I wrote articles that had no real angle, because the site had no niche, which in turn led to an online audience of about 20 or so people, mainly comprised of our parents. It had been funded, like my boss’s ranch house in the suburbs, entirely by his father.
Most days, Wally sat at his desk surfing the Internet, ignoring texts from his wife while the rest of us wrote terrible pieces that answered questions like, “Which bodily fluids can you send via mail?” I often caught him reading his own pieces, published years before, on online newspapers that people knew about. I thought he was very successful. My starting salary was one thousand dollars per month before taxes and the website’s profit margin remained steady at zero dollars. So, to supplement Wally’s slowly dwindling trust fund, the interns and I often jumped on unethical odd jobs for the “tutoring agency” with which we shared a Brooklyn office. The agency charged rich families in the tri-state area two hundred dollars an hour to consult on college applications, and we “ghost wrote” the personal essays for free in exchange for Wally’s office space.
“It has been a month now since the surgery,” I wrote in one such essay, under the byline of a girl who had recently undergone simple Lasik. “Occasionally, I hear my mom’s voice cautiously suggest that we add a few more colleges to my list—specifically, ones with amenities for the blind.”
I got into a lot of colleges that year.
Wally had to be home for dinner every night to eat with his family, but before he left us to our voluntary overtime, he always gave an extremely quiet motivational speech about how we had to keep the ship from going under.
“These projects might keep us afloat—Gupta, Abraham, Pinker,” Wally whispered, looking pale as he listed the names of college-bound, teenage clients we had never met, before slipping away to the elevators. “Please. I don’t want to lose my job.”
His reliance on us, and his perpetual fear of economic failure, made the interns and I feel grown up and important. It never occurred to me to ask for a raise, because I assumed that, if I did, Wally’s family would starve. Late at night, after Wally went home and the tutoring agency people turned out the lights, we talked in the dark, our faces lit by laptop screens, about what an “opportunity” it was to have the freedom to write what we wanted, and put it online—the word “exposure” was thrown around a lot, usually when Adderall was available—and we all agreed that Wally was a great guy for trusting us with his “brand.”
*
To save money I commuted four hours each day from a guesthouse in New Jersey that I’d found on Craiglist. I lived behind a towering, red-brick mansion for almost zero dollars. The guesthouse was the mansion’s miniature twin. Both resembled the dollhouses that I noticed in the cellar one day while doing my laundry.
My landlord was a pleasant-seeming woman named Maude, who liked to garden. She was petite, blonde and spritely, and lived in the Main House with her college-aged daughter, Elizabeth, who was home for the summer. She was more than willing to tell me about herself, which I liked, because often our stories contain secrets, and I adore secrets. I discovered that the mansion and the guesthouse and Maude’s ability to constantly garden had been secured through Maude’s thirty-odd years spent running what turned into a multi-million dollar corporate sweatshirt business, which she’d sold prior to the recession—a period during which few corporations needed swag because they’d all gone bankrupt. I found stacks of sweatshirts in every closet emblazoned with the names of economic casualties.
When I first arrived, Maude said that she and Elizabeth had just welcomed a houseguest named Salina—a former weight-loss instructor who had worked at a fat camp in Hawaii, and now lived in Salt Lake City, where she worked part time as a personal trainer. Maude alluded to the fact that Salina been contracted for the summer to help Elizabeth lose weight. I said I looked forward to meeting both of them. Maude smiled and disappeared inside.
I left early in the morning and returned late, so at first it didn’t seem strange to me that I hadn’t yet met Salina or Elizabeth. After being screamed at by strangers all day to walk faster, to get out of the way, to fuck off—or, occasionally, to go “touch butts with your sister” (shouted at me by a schizophrenic street person), stepping off the commuter train onto the sidewalk of Maude’s chirping, picket-fence little town felt like paradise. I was too intoxicated to harbor suspicion. She provided me with towels and Egyptian cotton bedding. The guesthouse lacked certain amenities, including a kitchen, so she hauled a microwave and mini-fridge into my room. I bought a book called The Adventures of Microwavable Cooking. I used the toilet as a garbage disposal and washed dishes in the gigantic shower in my private bathroom. Usually I took pride in these endeavors. I felt abstemious and handy. Maude welcomed, invited, intoxicated me. She wanted me to call her Auntie Maude.
But then weird things began happening to my body. I had grown up eating Hot Pockets, but after years of eating semi-normal college cafeteria food, my intestines had apparently gotten snobbish about Chef Boyardee, which is to say that the microwavable meals were giving me explosive diarrhea. I mentioned to Maude that I really missed cooking, and she said, “Fine—maybe you can use the Main House kitchen—we’ll talk about it.” I waited for our talk, and ate sandwiches. I knelt on the floor of the guest house with white bread and generic-brand Jiffy and Smuckers, and used whatever book I was reading as a cutting board. By the time I’d finish a novel, it was sticky with jelly.
“Stop by the Main House anytime—you know, to use the kitchen, cook, say, ‘Hi’,” Maude reiterated. “At the very least, come for dinner.”
I quickly tabulated how much money I could save per dinner. I considered the nutritional value of semi-regular meals that were neither microwavable nor freeze dried.
“How about now?” I asked.
“We’ll talk about it soon,” she said.
The guesthouse was not entirely mine. I slept in an enclave off the entryway, partially separated from the communal shoe rack by a walnut paneled room divider. Up the stairs from me: Maude’s office. Across the hallway: the living room that Maude used for her yoga practice. She came in at odd hours. Once I woke at two o’clock in the morning to see her silhouette in the doorway, backlit by the moon. “I can’t sleep so I’m going to do some Vinyasa,” she shout-whispered.
I tried to drag the room divider to fully block the sightlines between the front door and my bed, but once stretched wide enough, it always fell. No matter how I accordioned it, you could still see my coverlet. It was hard to focus on the work I brought home, knowing she could throw open the door at any moment, so I hung out a lot in the bathroom. I used the toilet as a desk and occasionally breaked from work to take long showers. The shower was bigger than my bed, and included a plastic bench that I could sit on while shampooing. In my mind, the only thing more luxurious than waiting for Wally to take his lunch break so I could re-watch one of two films involving my celebrity crush (an indie-film actor-director whom I’ll call Magnus), involved hunkering down on that waterproof chair. I stared into the shower blast and imagined myself as a naked queen on her throne, being carried on the backs of slaves through a thunderstorm, staring defiantly into the face of Rain Gods. Because I did not pay for water, wasting it made me feel wealthy. I flushed the toilet more than was strictly necessary, and began showering three times a day, anointing myself over and over again, just because.
But sociologists reserve the term for exhibitions of unconditional acceptance geared toward indoctrination. Military recruiters, for instance, might love bomb a potential recruit—first by emphasizing the military’s exclusivity, then by asking questions that presumably speak to the newcomer’s idealized self-image, implying that he is one of few eligible to join. The recruiter says, “You can’t be in the military unless you’re very, very strong—like Hercules.” And then, “How long have you had such enormous and impressive muscles attached to your body?”
Cults do it, too. And like any organization eager to enlist worshippers, certain religious groups (especially historically young religions, such as Scientology, born-again Evangelicalism, or Mormonism, whose very existence depends on conversion) will love bomb probable converts by exaggerating similarities between the group and the other, always in a way that promises acceptance and forthcoming exaltation.
In general, such tactics work best on the lonely.
*
I had never been lonelier. I lived alone, had very few friends, and worked seventy hours a week, for very little money, under the management of a physically affectionate boss named Wally, who occasionally wept in front of me about strained relations with his wife.
Our company was Wally’s brainchild. He’d pitched it to investors as “a newspaper website (a newspaper, except it’s only online),” during a time when newspapers already had websites. His underlings included one full-time employee (me) as well as seven very exhausted, unpaid interns, who I assume (and hope) were independently wealthy because they all went to Sarah Lawrence, which is the most expensive college in the world. We were in a recession. Since graduating college, nearly everyone I knew had already been fired at least once. But acquiring hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans was often as easy as clicking a button that read, “I accept my award!” I felt lucky to have a job.
In general, the interns and I wrote articles that had no real angle, because the site had no niche, which in turn led to an online audience of about 20 or so people, mainly comprised of our parents. It had been funded, like my boss’s ranch house in the suburbs, entirely by his father.
Most days, Wally sat at his desk surfing the Internet, ignoring texts from his wife while the rest of us wrote terrible pieces that answered questions like, “Which bodily fluids can you send via mail?” I often caught him reading his own pieces, published years before, on online newspapers that people knew about. I thought he was very successful. My starting salary was one thousand dollars per month before taxes and the website’s profit margin remained steady at zero dollars. So, to supplement Wally’s slowly dwindling trust fund, the interns and I often jumped on unethical odd jobs for the “tutoring agency” with which we shared a Brooklyn office. The agency charged rich families in the tri-state area two hundred dollars an hour to consult on college applications, and we “ghost wrote” the personal essays for free in exchange for Wally’s office space.
“It has been a month now since the surgery,” I wrote in one such essay, under the byline of a girl who had recently undergone simple Lasik. “Occasionally, I hear my mom’s voice cautiously suggest that we add a few more colleges to my list—specifically, ones with amenities for the blind.”
I got into a lot of colleges that year.
Wally had to be home for dinner every night to eat with his family, but before he left us to our voluntary overtime, he always gave an extremely quiet motivational speech about how we had to keep the ship from going under.
“These projects might keep us afloat—Gupta, Abraham, Pinker,” Wally whispered, looking pale as he listed the names of college-bound, teenage clients we had never met, before slipping away to the elevators. “Please. I don’t want to lose my job.”
His reliance on us, and his perpetual fear of economic failure, made the interns and I feel grown up and important. It never occurred to me to ask for a raise, because I assumed that, if I did, Wally’s family would starve. Late at night, after Wally went home and the tutoring agency people turned out the lights, we talked in the dark, our faces lit by laptop screens, about what an “opportunity” it was to have the freedom to write what we wanted, and put it online—the word “exposure” was thrown around a lot, usually when Adderall was available—and we all agreed that Wally was a great guy for trusting us with his “brand.”
*
To save money I commuted four hours each day from a guesthouse in New Jersey that I’d found on Craiglist. I lived behind a towering, red-brick mansion for almost zero dollars. The guesthouse was the mansion’s miniature twin. Both resembled the dollhouses that I noticed in the cellar one day while doing my laundry.
My landlord was a pleasant-seeming woman named Maude, who liked to garden. She was petite, blonde and spritely, and lived in the Main House with her college-aged daughter, Elizabeth, who was home for the summer. She was more than willing to tell me about herself, which I liked, because often our stories contain secrets, and I adore secrets. I discovered that the mansion and the guesthouse and Maude’s ability to constantly garden had been secured through Maude’s thirty-odd years spent running what turned into a multi-million dollar corporate sweatshirt business, which she’d sold prior to the recession—a period during which few corporations needed swag because they’d all gone bankrupt. I found stacks of sweatshirts in every closet emblazoned with the names of economic casualties.
When I first arrived, Maude said that she and Elizabeth had just welcomed a houseguest named Salina—a former weight-loss instructor who had worked at a fat camp in Hawaii, and now lived in Salt Lake City, where she worked part time as a personal trainer. Maude alluded to the fact that Salina been contracted for the summer to help Elizabeth lose weight. I said I looked forward to meeting both of them. Maude smiled and disappeared inside.
I left early in the morning and returned late, so at first it didn’t seem strange to me that I hadn’t yet met Salina or Elizabeth. After being screamed at by strangers all day to walk faster, to get out of the way, to fuck off—or, occasionally, to go “touch butts with your sister” (shouted at me by a schizophrenic street person), stepping off the commuter train onto the sidewalk of Maude’s chirping, picket-fence little town felt like paradise. I was too intoxicated to harbor suspicion. She provided me with towels and Egyptian cotton bedding. The guesthouse lacked certain amenities, including a kitchen, so she hauled a microwave and mini-fridge into my room. I bought a book called The Adventures of Microwavable Cooking. I used the toilet as a garbage disposal and washed dishes in the gigantic shower in my private bathroom. Usually I took pride in these endeavors. I felt abstemious and handy. Maude welcomed, invited, intoxicated me. She wanted me to call her Auntie Maude.
But then weird things began happening to my body. I had grown up eating Hot Pockets, but after years of eating semi-normal college cafeteria food, my intestines had apparently gotten snobbish about Chef Boyardee, which is to say that the microwavable meals were giving me explosive diarrhea. I mentioned to Maude that I really missed cooking, and she said, “Fine—maybe you can use the Main House kitchen—we’ll talk about it.” I waited for our talk, and ate sandwiches. I knelt on the floor of the guest house with white bread and generic-brand Jiffy and Smuckers, and used whatever book I was reading as a cutting board. By the time I’d finish a novel, it was sticky with jelly.
“Stop by the Main House anytime—you know, to use the kitchen, cook, say, ‘Hi’,” Maude reiterated. “At the very least, come for dinner.”
I quickly tabulated how much money I could save per dinner. I considered the nutritional value of semi-regular meals that were neither microwavable nor freeze dried.
“How about now?” I asked.
“We’ll talk about it soon,” she said.
The guesthouse was not entirely mine. I slept in an enclave off the entryway, partially separated from the communal shoe rack by a walnut paneled room divider. Up the stairs from me: Maude’s office. Across the hallway: the living room that Maude used for her yoga practice. She came in at odd hours. Once I woke at two o’clock in the morning to see her silhouette in the doorway, backlit by the moon. “I can’t sleep so I’m going to do some Vinyasa,” she shout-whispered.
I tried to drag the room divider to fully block the sightlines between the front door and my bed, but once stretched wide enough, it always fell. No matter how I accordioned it, you could still see my coverlet. It was hard to focus on the work I brought home, knowing she could throw open the door at any moment, so I hung out a lot in the bathroom. I used the toilet as a desk and occasionally breaked from work to take long showers. The shower was bigger than my bed, and included a plastic bench that I could sit on while shampooing. In my mind, the only thing more luxurious than waiting for Wally to take his lunch break so I could re-watch one of two films involving my celebrity crush (an indie-film actor-director whom I’ll call Magnus), involved hunkering down on that waterproof chair. I stared into the shower blast and imagined myself as a naked queen on her throne, being carried on the backs of slaves through a thunderstorm, staring defiantly into the face of Rain Gods. Because I did not pay for water, wasting it made me feel wealthy. I flushed the toilet more than was strictly necessary, and began showering three times a day, anointing myself over and over again, just because.
by Kathleen Hale, Hazlit | Read more:
Image: Jeremy Sorese
