Social Skills or Emotional Reciprocity

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The most debilitating part of AS from my point of view is not talking to women but being unable to enjoy activities with NTs and share their empathetic view of the world. Do all Aspies struggle with this in equal measure? Do Aspie men struggle with this more than Aspie Women?

I'm female and I've been called emotionally cold by my husband. I think I am emotionally more cold than a lot of people too, I think their description of me is accurate. But I still think that if I bother I can act the way I'm supposed, ie: act caring. But that seems a near useless skill that I'm losing as an adult who doesn't force themselves into social situations, unlike a child who was always being put in social situations.

It's most obvious for things that I don't feel bad about not caring about, like national or international disasters. I've been called out by a friend once for saying I didn't care about 911 when it happened, as I wasn't personally negatively affected or distressed or upset by it. (I live like, over 500k away from it, nope, didn't bother me.)

If I were to have aspergers my seeming lack of proper emotional response at the proper time to many situations would be a crucial for my diagnosis, as it seems quite unclear to me if I meet enough aspergers criteria. I just don't get emotionally attached to people that strongly, and I keep myself distanced a lot of the time, and sometimes even if I'd like to I just can't emotionally attach to people. That's why when I do become emotionally attached to someone I take it seriously and relish it. It's also in part why I know I'd be incredibly useful in emergencies as I have a good control of panic, unlike my husband who would be a blubbering mess.

I sometimes wonder that because of innate poor impulse control (as might be my case, I certainly have poor impulse control nowadays and I did as a child too, but all children do too), that as a child I adopted a distancing tactic a bit too well so I could act in an acceptable way to things. Like, instead of trying and failing to control my impulses, having lower emotional states stops the impulses before they happen.

I speculate too much. I feel that most of my speculation's wrong anyways. I wouldn't be surprised if more men were more emotionally detached than women, but I wouldn't be surprised if that weren't the case either. No matter though, I'm pretty sure that not all aspies even experience this.

uhuh..my emotional responses are atypical, to say the least. I am passionate about some things though but they are abstract or animal/plant related.

I think humans are too emotional for me to deal with so I shut down completely instead.

I think the topic is very insightful. Aspie tend to stay with ourselves because we simply do not enjoy big group with NT. Sometimes it is not NT alienate us. But us alienate NT because we just didn't enjoy with a big group of people because we don't share same interest. Sometimes, it's because of past failures in relationship or bad experience of being bullied by NT. So we don't try to social unless it's necessary. For me, I can social and make friends but I just found this exhausting and not worth it.