Time for me to vent - about Friendship

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I have this friend - an old girlfriend, who recently (about 6 months ago) contacted me after 30 years. She was always good to me - never tried to change me to be more "normal." After talking with her (on the phone & in person) a number of times, I can tell she is still the same person I fell in love with all those years ago.

However, she has a history of pushing people away (not unlike myself) and making herself unavailable. She's very catlike - relationships are always on her terms.

Personally, since I discovered I have AS, I've been trying to promote friendships (something I've always had trouble with - due to my tendency to push people away.) I have had high hopes that this old friend could possibly become a new friend. I've really been trying to do friendly things: be supportive, be accepting, make her laugh - and not push - let her control the pace of our friendship.

So the situation is this: she lives 200 miles east of the city where we grew up & I live 100 miles west. We both have aging parents living there. Our fathers are in the same nursing home. Her mother recently broke he ankle & is house-bound for a while. We both currently visit our parents every weekend.

We are both quite fit & exercise every day - although she is in training for triathlon & I do it just for fun. She works with a trainer 5-6 days a week (in addition to her daily exercise routine.) If she were an Aspie (I don't think she is), exercise would definitely be a combination special interest & stimming for her (she seriously spends about 3 hours a day exercising.)

Despite both of us being in the same town once a week - the last time we visited in person was four months ago (for about an hour.) We haven't even talked on the phone in over a month, because of her busy schedule - although we send a lot of e-mails to each other.

She says that she wants to be my friend & keep our connection - but I'm beginning to wonder.

For the coming holiday (American Thanksgiving), I invited her to join my family (my sister is cooking & encouraged me to invite her to join us.) She said she would let me know.

So yesterday, she e-mails to ask when I will be leaving - I said Thanksgiving Day (Thursday), about noon - getting into town about 2 p.m.

She says - never mind - she plans to get in the night before, needs to send an e-mail that night - but her mother doesn't have Internet. Do I know of any place in town with free Wi-Fi? And by the way, she's leaving to go back to her home early a.m. on Thanksgiving, coming back to her mother's on Friday & then back home for the weekend (she has a race Saturday.)

*So I guess she won't be joining me for Thanksgiving.*

I sense an opportunity to see her, face-to-face - so I told her I would be happy to come in early & she could use the Internet at my mother's house - and we could visit for a bit.

So I rearrange my schedule, call my mother to let her know, rush to pack this morning, so I can leave right after work tonight.

This morning, I get an e-mail from her - "Don't worry about tonight - I found a restaurant with Wi-Fi & I'm feeling sick anyway. Thanks for the offer."



*"Don't worry." *



Before I knew I had AS, this would have seriously caused a meltdown. I had no idea why situations like this affected me so strongly. This would have completely blindsided me. Now, I know more about myself & can cope better - but it's still difficult.

I can see that I'm not as important to her as she is to me. It makes me very sad.

Of course, I'm still looking forward to seeing my family tomorrow - but I really hate that I don't have friends (at least, not the way other people seem to have friends.)

Maybe I try too hard - maybe I shouldn't have gone out of my way to make it possible for us to visit.

How are friends *supposed* to act? (Seriously - that isn't a rhetorical question.)

When I think about it, it would have caused me a lot less stress to just tell her to go to a restaurant & resign myself to not seeing her anytime in the near future. (Which is exactly the kind of thing I've done my entire life - I really thought that was why I don't have friends - maybe I need to re-evaluate that assumption.)

On the other hand, it's becoming more and more stressful to not have friends. I don't see any of my co-workers as anything more than co-workers (I really don't trust them enough to even be social with them.) Pretty much all of the friends of my youth have gotten married - and I really don't feel welcome in their lives anymore.

I thought this was my chance to be close to someone - and maybe it still could be, sometime in the future. It's a disappointment, but I don't hate her for being who she is. I'm just confused.

Did she know you had already rearranged your schedule? If not, maybe she felt bad about inconveniencing you and that's why she found somewhere else. If she does have AS tendencies, she might not have picked up on the fact that you wanted to see her anyway (if she pushes people away, she might be quite insecure- maybe she felt you were only being polite).

That's exactly what came to my mind as well.

Lene, there might be a lot of truth in what you say - she has a number of what I consider to be "AS tendencies," even though she also has a lot of NT tendencies.

I didn't use the exact words "rearrange my schedule" - I just told her that I would come in after work tonight instead of tomorrow, so she could meet me at my mother's house to use the Internet. I don't know if that would fail to imply a rearrangement of schedule - but I'm willing to concede that there is always a chance that one or both of us made some incorrect assumptions.

I try to be explicit about my intentions, because that's what I hope to get in return. (When I told her about my AS, I said that part of what it means is I don't read other people very well. She has always been straight with me, so we agreed to continue to say things straight out to each other.) When I told her I would change my plans to come in for her, my exact words were "I certainly don't mind coming in early, if it means we can spend a little time together."

I'm sure there are lots of extenuating circumstances - she tends to drive herself too hard. After I told her I was coming in early, she mentioned a sore throat & slight fever yesterday - so, in her words "Home right after work tonight… only have bike ride 45 minutes (I think and that is inside) to get in, and 1/2 hour of core exercises, then I am off to rest." Plus, she was going to get up early this morning to swim, & I'm almost certain that she plans to train tomorrow - that's a lot of activity, even without a fever.

In the back of my mind, I was thinking if she has a fever, she should get right to bed for at least a day & not bother driving 200 miles (whether or not it meant that I wouldn't get to see her.)

So, in a way, I could have predicted the outcome. I guess I'm more than a bit upset at myself for getting my hopes up - especially once she mentioned that she was feeling sick.

A holiday weekend can be rough for socializing. A lot of people have emotional baggage about the holidays which the medias (TV, radio, news papers) try to cash in on. We all get bombarded even if we're not looking for it.

Perhaps that's what's going on with your friend.

In any case, have you tried expanding your friendship experiment to include other people? Social clubs, religious organizations, adult education classes, volunteer charity work for example.

Yeah - Thanksgiving is problematical - I just had a feeling that she might be spending it alone.

There are a couple other people I'm trying to be friends with, although we aren't very close yet. I know this is the AS talking, but I have a hard time thinking of more than one friend at a time. My brain is telling me to focus on one person & "get it right" - before I can move on to the next.

I do volunteer work with a non-profit youth organization that I helped to start - but still have a hard time thinking of the other people involved as more than co-workers. Religion is out - never had a good experience with it. Adult education classes might be a problem, since I tend to be so focused on being the best student, that I shut everyone else out.

That leaves clubs - hmmm. I do think about this & periodically look into what type of social club I might want to join. Still haven't found one that interests me. Thought I might meet people when I joined a gym, but everyone is so into their own thing that they don't seem to see me.

This all sounds like I'm making excuses for myself - and I guess I am. Part of my current plan is to seek out a professional Dx, then try Cognitive Behavior Therapy - which I think would be helpful in my case. This friendship thing has been kicking my butt for most of my life - it's more than I can do on my own.