Resigned to Loneliness

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i'm nearly your age and the only thing that has worked to slightly dull my barby points is the cognitive dulling which comes with aging. and it is not so much that i am honest to any abnormal degree, but that i tend to go off half-cocked [e.g., i failed to notice your "in theory" qualifier], and analagous to my lack of proprioception, i lack a solid sense of boundaries in my thinking as well, and am always tripping over my own cerebral dingledangle.
anyways, i do appreciate your charitable comments.

No problem.....and note that your failure to spot my qualification hasn't done any harm - I could tell you weren't trying to score points off me.

And don't forget to apportion some of the blame for social failure onto the myriads of judgemental people who IMHO cause half of the problems with AS. It's dangerous to take this too far, but I'm sure that to some extent, most of us feel marginalised because we haven't met the right people yet.

Generally when you complain about something to a doctor, the doctor assumes you are looking for a cure. I'm guessing that you were just answering a question honestly and he took it as a complaint.

I've pretty well resigned myself to loneliness, too, and I'm also quite sure I'm not depressed. Depression is a chemical imbalance. Loneliness is caused by circumstances. I feel that people like me well enough, but I think that my awkwardness and inconsistent social skills makes people uncomfortable. I try to make myself useful so that I'm appreciated and invited to things even though I feel like an outsider looking in. I don't really want to be inside. I think many if not most people are a real mess and I don't want to get entangled in their mess. It seems like half the women I know are on some kind of anti-anxiety meds. I feel reasonably happy and relaxed most of the time and have no need for meds. It's just that I have this constant longing to connect and it never seems to happen and it leaves a constant ache in my chest.

I think loneliness might actually be a pretty normal thing, though, even for NTs.

My problem isn't bluntness. It's that I can talk over people's heads. I don't mean to sound arrogant, but it's true; in a simple conversation, I'll bring something up I know is of relevance, and then I'll lose who ever I'm talking to.
Example: Years ago, I had a job at a metal shop, and while on break, a guy I knew was mentioning how there were similar sounding words in Spanish and English. I happened to mention the closest language to English was Frisian, a dialect of low German spoken in northwest Germany and the Netherlands, and how you could almost understand it. I was explaining how the Frisians had taken part in the Anglo-Saxon migration to 5th century Britain - - when the guy turned an walked away...
The fact is, that is typical of how I get on with people. I know these were guys who had little more than high school educations, but I had always thought that respecting people entailed not dumbing down conversations with anyone, regardless of who they are. Story of my life, man.
Frankly, I'm amazed I'm married, and have any friends at all.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

i would have found your educational expounding to be enlightening. but any good entertainer has to know his audience. it is a fine line to walk, between being too elementary and sounding patronizing or unintentionally boring, or being too erudite and sailing over people's heads or making them feel cognitively inferior. the best policy is to find a social niche which can safely preclude most mixed company. it is the rare person who can please everybody.

auntblabby, you, I'm sure, are absolutely right - as you seem to be on most subjects (and I sincerely mean that). But hey, the reason I'm here is because I'm an Aspie, and admittedly a lot of things that would register with most other people gets past me.
But I appreciate your compliment of finding my "educational expounding to be enlightening."

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Yep. I still have to battle with that trait. Dad used to do the same thing, and in those days we didn't know about AS......watching him, it was so obvious that it didn't work, and quite understandable that the people he trapped with his talking didn't usually come back for more. I always used to wonder why he bothered hanging out with people at all, as it was obvious that he had no interest in them as people, but just used them as receptacles for whatever wisdom he happened to want to spray out of his fountain of specialised knowledge. It really did come over as an attitude problem, though of course I now know it was AS.

I've also had that feeling that to reduce the intellectual challenge of my stuff would be just dumbing it down. But these days I don't think it's really that. Just that a social setting is different from a think tank. Thinking hard and collecting/distributing/organising data is very important, but it doesn't have to be the only style of communication. There's playtime as well as worktime. But even after I took that on board, it still isn't easy to deliver.

Come to think of it, back in junior high, I recall how I'd regard people more as "receptacles" for stuff I knew.
My Dad, whom I'm certain also had Asperger's, used to go on and on about his passion - gardening and horticulture. I recall how he would be seemingly oblivious - or perhaps just wouldn't care - when people would snicker when he'd potificate on a certain subject of gardening.
Me, I find myself doing the same thing in regard to usually history.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

I can't understand people and they can't understand me either.

rejection gets old. I just gave up because I feel like I don't need people to keep myself occupied or have fun

Home invasions do not worry me as much as possible health defects. And then there's issues with affordable health insurance, etc. I guess hospitals can provide some relief, but they tend to be places where people can get sicker, with all the germs and stuff.



Not exactly. I lost the password info for my original email account and had to start a new one. I'm fairly new, but I've posted some stuff before.

Loneliness does not equal pain nor any semblance of pain, at least as far as I am concerned. The only pain that stems from it is a notion of what happens when you start aging and getting too sick to fend for yourself?

When you live with the kinds of perceptions I live with on a daily basis, there's no reason to fear loneliness. I have the objects within my own environment to provide me with comfort. If you have that, then you are not lonely. I seek solace in that which interests me and in the objects that define my surroundings. I guess some out there wouldn't be able to understand that. For me, it's innate. It's the way I perceive the world around me. It's a deep, personal, sensory and emotional experience.

Apparently social rejection triggers brain activity that's very similar to what you get from physical pain - they did an experiment on this where they included the subject in a game of catch, and then got the other people to stop throwing the ball to the subject, thus socially excluding them, and the subjects' brains went "ouch!"

I don't know whether the usual bad feelings about simply being alone would give the same result. During some of my most intense moments of loneliness, I could see myself as an old man dying without any friends. But it wasn't so much a fear of them not being there to save my life, it was a fear of them not being there to comfort me emotionally. But nobody can really know how they'll die. I could get the best relationship in the world, but she could die first, or I could die when she's not around.

Other aspects of how I feel when I'm lonely are more difficult to describe. I've had a vague memory of a field in sunshine - don't know what that's about. Mostly these days, loneliness is more like hunger.....I have social interaction, but it's not intense enough, it doesn't happen often enough, I've got to get more of it, lots more.

i guess that part of my brain wore out from overuse. like a car horn that doesn't work anymore. anyways, it was a choice of "keep suffering" or "get used to it."

I think they call that being "punch drunk." I remember being hypersensitive to rejection for many years......I'd detest anybody who took me by surprise by being unexpectedly cold towards me, even the smallest things like not saying hello. I like to think I've simply mellowed rather than burned out the wiring.......and I'm much more likely to think about why they might have chilled me out, and sometimes the reasons aren't all that different to the way I'd behave if I were in their shoes.

Maybe you just no longer hope for much inclusion, so that exclusion becomes less of a shock? In my case I seem very well-defended against rejection, and part of that is a strong reluctance to raise my hopes, even when the situation looks very positive. Yet there's a general hope of inclusion that seems absolutely perennial, kind of an incurable romantic spirit. I seem to get fed up with being so safe and guarded, and occasionally take impulsive risks where I don't care if I get shot to pieces, and that tends to work out well, though usually I daren't do that.