When Love Bombing Feels Like Fate, Until It Doesn’t

By Sienna, This is a real breakup story about heartbreak after love bombing, ignoring intuition, and learning how to choose yourself instead of waiting to be chosen. (This story has been shared with permission under an alias name)

My breakup happened three years ago. We were only together for three months, but the impact lasted far longer than that. At the time, it felt like fate. Looking back, it was intensity — and I didn’t know the difference.

When we met, it moved quickly. I had a quiet hesitation in the beginning — he had just come out of a long-term relationship and had been cheated on. I knew her name. I knew what she looked like. I knew the entire emotional history in detail. Something in me understood he hadn’t processed it.

I felt it. And I ignored it.

Because what followed felt like everything my heart had been waiting for.

He told me he loved me after a couple of weeks. He talked about children. He spoke about a future with certainty. Our lives blended at lightning speed — meeting family, travelling together, working together. It felt intense, romantic, deeply validating.

Strong. Hard. Fast.

The romantic in me didn’t lean in. I disappeared into it.

Looking back now, this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. It was the third intense relationship in three years. Each one fast, consuming, full of promise. Each one built on the same foundation: a version of me who believed that if a man chose me — really chose me — then everything else would fall into place.

I didn’t ask myself what I needed.
I didn’t ask what I wanted in a partner.
I just wanted to be chosen.

That made me a perfect match for love bombing, even if I didn’t have that language yet.

Naturally, I decided to relocate and move in with him. And then, the day I was moving in — the day before Valentine’s Day — he broke up with me.

I was 31 years old, standing in a house I didn’t know, surrounded by my boxes, in a place where I had one friend. I still can’t find the right words for how I felt. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I felt physically ill.

My body was in shock and my mind kept looping these questions:

What is wrong with me?
How did that happen?

How could someone say all those things, talk about a future, make love to me that morning and end it by the afternoon?

At first, I went into survival mode. I just knew I had to leave the house. I didn’t know where I was going — only that I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t speak to him. I had never been hurt like that before. No one had ever planted seeds of family and long-term commitment so deliberately. It was exactly what I wanted, and I held onto it so tightly that I never saw the ground disappear beneath my feet.

I didn’t know heartbreak could cause physical pain. I was a shell of myself. Lights on. Nobody home.

Two weeks later, I was booked to go on an all-girls surf retreat. By that point I had lost weight. I wasn’t eating. I wasn’t sleeping. I had no energy — let alone the energy to surf. But I got on the plane anyway.

There was no internet. No phone service. Just the ocean, movement, and women. It didn’t fix anything. But it interrupted the spiral. I cried quietly at the back of the boat when no one was watching. I screamed underwater to release what I couldn’t hold inside. When I finally told a few of the girls what had happened, every single one of them had their own breakup story. Every single one showed care.

That mattered more than the waves.

When the retreat ended, the heartbreak hit again. I was back to living out of boxes in a place I didn’t know, with a voice in my head whispering maybe he’ll surprise you. Maybe he’ll take it all back.

He didn’t.

It wasn’t until I moved into my own room and turned it into a sanctuary that I felt my first real sense of relief. I went from crying every hour to crying every few days. I started eating again. I slept through the night. That mattered.

For six months, I was in rebuild mode.

The thought of doing anything other than rebuilding myself made me feel physically ill. No dating. No talking to men. In some moments, I couldn’t even look at them. I decided to stay in the new area — to trust the relocation, even if the reason for it had fallen apart. I made new friends. I created a life I had always wanted, without waiting for a partner to complete it.

After therapy, energy healing, breathwork, travel, and a solid self-care routine, something shifted. For the first time in my life, I didn’t want to be chosen.

I wanted to choose.

I realised that every past relationship had started with my feet nowhere near the ground — a whirlwind where I created a future before the present had even begun. This time, I wanted to be grounded. Clear. In control. The moment I knew I would be okay was when I started seeing the truth: he wasn’t right for me at all. We weren’t compatible. I had been so focused on the idea of a future that I never stopped to ask who that future was actually with.

Through deep self-work, I began to see the pattern. I can’t change that he said all those things. I can’t change that I believed him. What I could change was understanding why I believed him — even when, deep down, I knew something wasn’t right. I had pushed my intuition away. I stopped listening to myself.

And that was the work.

Being single in my 30s felt isolating at first, especially watching others in relationships or having children. But once I found others in the same stage of life, everything softened. There is joy here. Enough money to do what you like. Enough experience to know who you want around you. Enough clarity to live intentionally. Some of the friendships I formed during this time are now the strongest in my life.

If heartbreak were to arrive again, I would

There weren’t specific resources that carried me through back then. But now, there is The Breakup Bible. And if heartbreak were to arrive again, I know exactly where I’d land.

Stories like this exist for anyone who mistook intensity for alignment. For anyone who thought being chosen meant being loved. For anyone learning — sometimes painfully — how to choose themselves instead.

If you’ve been here before, or if you’re here now, your story belongs too.

Editor’s note: We value the stories that our community gives us permission to share and the trust they hold in us to curate accurately and hold their heartbreak with respect, respect that comes from both us as the author and you as the reader.