Those of us who have fallen victim to love bombing genuinely deserve financial compensation. A societal shift is taking place where committed relationships are becoming a rare commodity. Do I feel better that Taylor Swift may or may not have made half of her new album about a situationship she was in? Well yes, yes I do.
So what is in the air? Has our societal conditioning of instant gratification seeped into our relationships causing people to flee once things get hard?
A trend of "hypermasculinity" is also circulating through social media where creators are influencing mostly impressionable boys and men to live up to a certain standard. Often times this includes subordinating women as a disposable object in our society rather than an entity equal to them. The modern archetype of what a woman is expected to be is also damaging. We are to be independent, but submissive enough to not overshadow the men in our life as that may feel their masculinity is threatened.
Let me now provide some historical context into how we have gotten here. After the Revolutionary War, American women were under the legal principle of coverture where their husbands or fathers had complete authority over them. After the Civil War, Enslaved men earned the right to vote before women. Over the years, women slowly gained rights such as employment out of the household, the ability to vote, own property etc., due to extraneous amounts of campaigning. In 1973 the Supreme Court case of Roe v. Wade determined that state prohibition of abortions was unconstitutional. All this work, and "progress" then becomes meaningless today when in 2022, the court overturns this decision saying the constitutional right of abortion was not a tradition of the United States.
If our federal government can so easily disenfranchise women based on the bandwagon of misogyny that trends and circulates through our society... individuals interested in women, have no foundation for respect to bring to a relationship.
Back to the important things.. Taylor Swifts new album, "The Tortured Poets Department" song "Down Bad" entails a girl being "beamed up" by an other worldly being that tells her she is "the chosen one", and provides "cosmic love". After this experience this being brings her back to the town she came from where she must reflect on this wild and amazing experience alone and never to meet or talk again. It is the most relatable, creative, and catchy way of describing how a situationship makes someone feel after the love bombing is all said and done. The "bombing" part of the phrase is unfortunately accurate as this interaction leaves trauma and a mark on the individual that got bombarded with love and attention then left in the aftershock of the trauma.