Avoidant partners may fail to acknowledge your feelings or rarely express their own emotions. They may not know how to handle emotional conversations or issues. If you have an emotional response, they may tell you it makes no sense or try to reason you out of your feelings. They may call you too sensitive.
Someone with an avoidant attachment in relationships may attempt to create distance, establish boundaries, and withdraw from emotional conversations in a romantic relationship.
In the initial part of addictive relationships, the love avoidant exhibits an illusion of intimacy, caring, and connection. They form an immediate attachment idealizing their love addict partner. They come on strong and appear charming, strong, stimulating, caring, generous, and devoted - (all seductive maneuvers).
Understanding Avoidant Attachment
Individuals with this style often find it difficult to express their emotions freely. They may maintain an aura of stoicism and detachment and have a tendency to steer conversations towards impersonal topics.
Partners with an avoidant attachment style often make their significant other feel unloved, unheard, unseen, or unimportant. Know that people with this style treasure freedom and are typically emotionally distanced. They need space, understanding, and recognition in adult relationships.
They go out of their way to spend time with you.
So they often try to keep people at a distance for as long as they can out of reluctance to take things to a deeper level. This being said, if your avoidant partner prioritizes you and goes out of their way to spend time with you, they're likely in love.
On the other hand, people with an avoidant attachment may be attracted to anxious partners because their pursuit and need for closeness reinforce the avoidant person's need for independence and self-reliance. Anxious and avoidant partners may also seek their partner's traits due to wanting those traits in themselves.
After intimacy deepens, the avoidant partner loses interest in being sexual, in hugging, kissing, and perhaps even holding hands. Some avoidant partners will seem to actively limit physical proximity, such as sitting closely together on a couch where contact may be possible.
They make the first move in a relationship
One of the main signs an avoidant loves you is that they make the first move! It is unnatural to make a move on you unless they are deeply in love with you! So, if they are reaching out, try to play coy and let them show you with attention!
For dating to progress, avoidants need someone willing to be vulnerable about their interest in them and be steadfast in their commitment so they have something to react against, as well as someone to attend to their emotional needs they struggle to connect with (on some level avoidants do actually crave this closeness ...
Feeling pressured to open up
Because of their childhood wounds, being vulnerable tends to be a huge trigger for people with an avoidant attachment style. They have spent years, if not decades, building barriers around them to keep others out.
Some studies showed that differences in attachment styles seem to influence both the frequency and the patterns of jealousy expression: individuals with the preoccupied or fearful-avoidant attachment styles more often become jealous and consider rivals as more threatening than those with the secure attachment style [9, ...
Avoidant individuals may gravitate towards Acts of Service or Quality Time as their primary love languages, as these gestures offer connection without excessive emotional vulnerability.
Slow to text back
Dismissive avoidants don't like instant back-and-forth texting unless it's urgent or they're really interested. Their typical response is to take their time when texting back. To them, it doesn't matter when you text back as long as you do text back.
Relationship Red Flag #1: The issue of space
In one direction, your partner needs too much space, and you feel like a single person in your relationship. This could be due to an avoidant attachment style, or it could also indicate a commitment issue.
A dismissive avoidant ex may tell you about someone they find attractive and even say they'd like to pursue a relationship with them, but they never do. This is a test to see your reaction to their “interest in alternatives” or even a “love-triangle”.
However, regardless of whether they are the instigator of a breakup or not, avoidant attachers tend to repress or avoid expression of their intense emotions in the aftermath. This response isn't to suggest that avoidant attachers don't feel the pain of a breakup – they do.
Fearful avoidants both want and fear intimacy. So they seek closeness. But once they do, their fear of intimacy and attachment kicks in and they suddenly feel the need to escape, and this is when they need you to chase them.
Avoidants tend to not want to give anything or anybody their time or their energy. If it doesn't serve them any purpose, they won't do it. So if they are with you and they are giving you their time, that is a really good indication that they care about you and they are putting you as a priority.
Once again, people with a dismissive-avoidant style showed that they did care about relationships. Dismissive avoidant students reported higher self-esteem and positive mood than non-dismissives—but only when told that surgency predicts future interpersonal success.
Because the avoidant type finds intimacy uncomfortable, they may compartmentalize sex as something that is purely physical and attempt to avoid bringing intimacy into their sex life. They may also use sex as a way of avoiding a certain conflict or emotional conversation within a relationship.
The avoidant person is excited by the openness and directness of the anxious person, having not yet met their threshold for emotional exposure, and so appear open and available. The avoidant attacher also feels free to be who they are as control is not yet present from the side of the anxious attacher.
Sex (and intimacy in general) can make avoidant adults uncomfortable. Considering that sex typically requires physical and psychological proximity, it can evoke discomfort in avoidant individuals. Therefore, adults with this attachment style often don't enjoy their sexual experiences.
Avoidant partners tend to talk more about independence rather than closeness, freedom rather than intimacy, and self-reliance rather than interdependence. They fear clingy people or being seen as clingy themselves.
People who are avoidant may feel uncomfortable with the vulnerability and intimacy required in close friendships. They may also struggle with asking for or giving emotional support. As a result, they may have few, if any, long-lasting friendships because friends feel like the relationship is one-sided.