How Long Does It Take for An Avoidant to Develop FEELINGS? ?</3?

Channel: Thais Gibson - Personal Development School
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMfyMPXfKSY

Breaks down the attraction-infatuation-feelings timeline across the four attachment styles, arguing the dismissive avoidant is the slowest to develop real feelings because real feelings require vulnerability.

Key points

• The speaker separates attraction, infatuation, and actual feelings. Attraction is near-instant for everyone; the later stages differ sharply by attachment style.
• Anxious: moves fastest, going attraction to infatuation in minutes and infatuation to feelings in days, because they build feelings in fantasy and quickly get deeply unmet needs met by an attentive person.
• Secure: slower than anxious; they meet their own needs and have fewer deeply unmet ones, so they are less prone to rapid infatuation.
• Dismissive avoidant: slowest of all four. They assume their needs will not be met and even fear having needs met (fearing dependence, helplessness, or being controlled), so infatuation may take weeks and real feelings are unlikely before the two-month mark.
• Feelings track vulnerability. The speaker cites a Julianne Holt-Lunstad-style 2010 study (~280,000 participants) linking chronic loneliness to health harms comparable to smoking a pack a day, and a follow-up finding loneliness is about lack of real vulnerable connection, not number of contacts.
• Avoidants downplay emotions and keep people at arm's length to avoid vulnerability. Conditions that help them open up: a partner who is empathetic, accepting/nonjudgmental, supportive, and who acknowledges effort.

Note: the loneliness study is invoked to support the vulnerability argument, not a direct measure of avoidant feeling timelines.