Friendship Difficulties

I am behind the eight ball on this one, eh? I stumbled across the blog and thought I would comment anyway, late though I may be.

I’m an Aspie, and I do have difficulties with friendships, though perhaps not the same ones as our dear Dr. House. I’m both inclined to be rather blunt (a good NT friend of mine once said I’m the only person she knows who could be described as ‘excessively honest,’ LOL) and to forget that most other people are more like each-other than they are like me. I’m a working adult (though I’ll be back in school to pursue an advanced degree soon), and I just figured out within the past year or so why some kids in my sixth grade class once asked me, “Why are you so stuck-up?”

They presumed I wouldn’t deign to speak to them; in truth, I just didn’t know how (for the record, I also assumed they were intentionally excluding me: maybe they weren’t?). I can also be a little prickly sometimes. Come to think of it, maybe I’m more like House than I thought.

For me, it boils down to context. Without a good sense of context, I just don’t know how to relate. The ‘TalkToStranger’ subroutine won’t run without some kind of trigger. Thus, at a convention of gamers, geeks, veterinarians, or horse people, I’ll probably be okay — there’s a context written in — but at a more general social gathering, like a party, I literally can’t figure out where to begin. I’m like a computer waiting for a user to come along and launch a program. I can’t, in those circumstances, initiate conversation on my own — not because I don’t want to, or can’t actually speak, but because I need someone to launch the damned software for me

If you don’t talk to people, you’re perceived as either shy or arrogant. I’m attractive and I stand up straight, so I get the latter anaylsis … okay, and I can be decidedly abrupty, stiff, and formal with strangers, which (especially when you sound like you grew up in New England prep schools, because you did) reads as arrogance to many people. It’s worst when people know me from somewhere like work — where there’s a strong sense of context, and I’m known to be a loquacious and opinionated leader — and encounter me in a purely social setting, where they think that my sudden silence means I A) don’t like them or B) am stuck up.

Over time, a given relationship evolves into its own context (or at least becomes comfortable enough that I can hang around with someone and neither of us feels obligated to say anything) — but even then, for me, it’s like software. If you don’t use your computer, the hardward might deteriorate, but the software doesn’t just tend to fall apart on its own. This makes me a less-than-ideal friend.

Thus, I might not think to launch the WriteToRobert subroutine unless something makes me think of him, which is unfortunate, because Robert is my best friend. That doesn’t mean my attachment to him deteriorates — nor do I feel slighted when he (another high-functioning Aspie) doesn’t write to me, or when we don’t talk for six months straight. The software remains. I continue to care about him whether we’re in communication or not, and he to care for me. When we pick up again, nothing has changed.

This is not the case for friendships with most NTs. Over the course of my life, a few have liked me enough to reciprocate in such a friendship, but the onus falls upon me, in this kind of case, to do what I can meet their needs (and I’m okay with that, as long as they can handle it when I need some space now and then). I used to feel that it fell upon them — then I realized that there are more of them than of me, and that while I’ve spent my whole life trying to figure out how to relate to the human race even a little, they’ve never had to think about it. Generally, if I leave it up to them, they won’t, because (lo and behold) they have no context. It doesn’t occur to them that I could need some kind of reminder to behave in some of the ways that they automatically expect of a friend.

The trouble for me is remembering A) that other people don’t really want blunt honesty (even when they say they do: you know, “Be honest: do these pants make my butt look big?”) and B) other people feel slighted if I ‘ignore’ them for half a year. As such, I’ve learned to be more politic (working helpdesk for about a year really helped me, there — also got me over my paralytic fear of telephones) and programmed a bunch of little reminder functions into my day-to-day routine (8:00 AM: arrive at work, check calendar –oh, look! Michelle’s birthday is coming up! Send her an e-Card!). This hasn’t really helped with the lack-of-context problem that makes it hard to meet new people, but it does help me maintain my existing friendships.

I do think Aspies and other people on the Autistic spectrum can have meaningful and fulfilling friendships — I think it’s a question of figuring out what our individual challenges are, and understanding that, while we can ask for accomodation in the world, we will usually have to explain how it needs to work, and will often have to implement it ourselves. Oh, and that people may understand intellectually without understanding viscerally: I explain to my friends that I have trouble talking on the phone (I still don’t entirely understand why, myself), but they still get confused about why, when a few hours ago we were gabbing away a mile a minute over coffee, I’m suddenly tongue-tied when they ring my cell.

It helps me to develop friendships with people who share similarly intense interests — horse people are universally obsessed with horses, for instance (there is no such thing as a casual equestrian, I am certain), so I can feel safe obsessively discussing horses with them. Mostly, they really don’t care if we never talk about anythign else at all. Geeks and computers likewise (and geeks and anime nearly so).

The greatest challenge for me is judging who will really be a good friend and who just wants to impose upon my good nature, since I tend to be a decent listener (or at least pretend to be) and to be generous with my resources (since I feel that if I don’t need all of something, there’s no reason not to share).

I also have absolutely no native ability to detect ulterior motives. Instead, I’ve learned to watch for cues that indicate someone isn’t being entirely straight with me (the problem being that they vary so broadly from person to person: anyone who tells you ‘nose-scratching indicates a liar’ has never, for example, suffered from allergies). I’m better at this than I used to be, but still not good enough at it to feel confident that I won’t be taken for a ride by someone pretending to be a friend.

Perhaps more importantly, I haven’t yet learned to reliably discern what people really want from me: sometimes, what I mean by ‘friend’ won’t be the same as what you mean, and your meaning might be different than a third party’s.

Thus, if what someone wants is simply a person to pal around and work out with, I am likely to overstep that bound and assume it’s okay to kvetch about this thing that’s irritating me at work, or something similar (lately, I’ve learned to err on the side of caution, most of the time). I’ve learned that other people have multiple levels of what they call ‘friendship,’ while to me, a friend is someone who has my back, and I have his (or hers). Anything less, and (to me at least) you’re not a friend — just an acquaintance. Of course, I’ve also learned not to say stuff like that sometimes, because it offends people, and sometimes prevents and acquaintance who might’ve been a friend from becoming one

I think the challenge for many of us is in learning, to some extent, to fake our way through the opening act, when the ability to appear understand the extremely subtle ways that NTs communicate (at which most of us Aspies are hopeless) is essential. At this point in my life, I do this by playing hard-to-get, to some extent: I let people come to me, so to speak. Before I cross the boundary of revealing my inner thoughts and feelings to potential friends, I wait for them to reveal theirs to me. Unfortunately, I suspect, this prevents certain people who might otherwise become good friends from doing so, because they take my reticence for lack of feeling, or assume (reasonably, as far as they’re concerned, likely based on earlier experiences) that I’m not interested.

Ironically, all this serves me extremely well in one area: I’m gay, and the gay community is obsessively social. A lot of drama goes along with all that frenetic sociality. I manage to avoid all that by being uninterested in socializing for its own sake. My quietness makes me seem unique and mysterious, which some guys find attractive — though I suspect most would find me utterly uninteresting if I ever responded to their overtures.

That’s one more important lesson: as a general rule, my experience has dictated to me that we Aspies aren’t big on wanting what we don’t have, while NTs are. Blonds want to be dark, short people want to be tall, muscular people want to be lean. The Aspies I know all tend to be more content with things as they are, and less motivated by the desire for acquisition of that which eludes them, than the NTs I know. The challenge in friendship is learning to harness this sort of native contentment, rather than allowing it to become the seed of jealousy (another thing from which most Aspies don’t seem to suffer much).

I don’t know if this will be at all useful, but it boils my experience down in as small a nutshell as possible (okay, so it’s really a pretty big nutshell).

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