The thing that makes love-bombing hard to detect is that it is indistinguishable from the real thing at close range, and it feels wonderful. Any detection method that asks you to assess whether the affection is genuine will fail, because the affection frequently is genuine in the moment and because you are the worst-placed person to judge.
So the signal is not the affection. It is three properties of it.
Velocity. Intimacy that has outrun the hours actually spent together — declarations of love in the second week, plans for a shared life in the first month, a claim of a connection unlike any other before you have seen the person tired, ill, or in an argument. Attachment binds on frequency and intensity of contact rather than on verified character, which means a bond can consolidate before any evidence about conduct exists.
Asymmetry. They know a great deal about you; you know a version of them with no dull parts, no ex-partner who behaved reasonably, and no witnesses. Disclosure has flowed in one direction, and the disclosures you received were selected.
Conditionality. What happens the first time you say no to something small.
The Arkansas research, by Strutzenberg, Wiersma-Mosley, Jozkowski and Becnel, is the empirical anchor and it connects the pattern to narcissistic attachment strategies in young adults: idealization deployed to secure control rather than to build intimacy, followed by devaluation.
The protocol that works is temporal rather than evaluative, and it can be stated as a rule you set in advance.
Ninety days before any irreversible step. Not a judgment about whether this person is trustworthy — a fixed interval before moving in, lending money, merging finances, changing jobs, relocating, or cutting anyone off. The interval is not there to gather evidence about them. It is there to outlast the phase in which your own assessment is unreliable, and every case in Part 6 of this guide involves someone whose assessment was compromised at exactly this point.
Within that window, run one test, and it costs nothing. Decline something small. Keep a prior arrangement with a friend. Take a day to think about a decision.
Someone building a relationship will be disappointed and will recover. Someone running an intake procedure will show you, briefly, what the warmth was for — and that reaction is the single highest-information event available to you.
This counters Law 13.