Feeling creeped out by "friendly" people

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You are truely human. All these people are doing is being fake and teaching that fakeness is the way to go about life when it only helps for the short term. Once it's drilled into their head that short term applications are the way to go, their relationships don't last long and their short term charm lands them into a more promiscuous lifestyle which further puts their physical self into danger plus their mental state.

I'm here for the long term solutions. You want short term? Walk the other way and flash those teeth at someone else.

I meant creeped out by over enthusiastic (often, but not exclusively, male) huggers on a power trip. Over-friendliness doesn't creep me out as such given how transparent it is. It's not like I'm going to fall for it, but I would say it annoys me more than that I find it creepy.

MindWithoutWalls, your closing question made me smile. Most NTs would probably like to think they're especially sensitive despite that being statistically impossible!

I would say that I am hypersensitive to moods, especially negative ones. I believe this is not uncommon for someone having been raised by a mother with fairly severe depression, amongst other mental health issues, as I was.

I have always taken an immediate dislike to the gregarious types who pretend that they are your best friend the minute they meet you .I usually vacate the area as soon as I can when I come across those types of people.

I assume people that are too friendly have an ulterior motive and they usually do.

I have been suckered in by those types sometimes. I would feel like I had a real connection with them and have no idea they weren't as sincere as I was. I finally learned to be wary of them.

readingbetweenlines, I also had a mother who had emotional issues (anger, in this case). I understand.

I'm not sure if I got my other question across clearly enough, because I had a little trouble connecting it to your answer. Let me try again. What I'm wondering about is frequency of being freaked out, as opposed to how intensely it's felt. We know Aspies are more intensely freaked out. Are we also more frequently? Or do NTs get disturbed by overfriendliness just as often, even though they make less of a big deal over it? Maybe something like this is hard to tell, because less of a big deal is made. Is this something you feel you might be able to answer?

Gosh that is a difficult question. And (just to be sure) you are specifically asking about freaking out about over friendliness, not freaking out in general about all sorts of things?

I do not know enough Aspies even for an experiential answer, let alone one that would have general validity. My impression (and it is just that) that excessive friendliness tends to bother Aspies more intensely and more frequently.

A lot of the pictures in the posts above for example have very smiley, heavIly made up people in them. To me they are posing for publicity, so of course they look a bit over the top but that is just what shoots like that are like, so doesn't bother me.

Likewise on holiday in the US the waitresses tend to be a bit over the top cheery (from a gloomy British perspective) but that's what we think the US is like and the waitress is after a good tip because her basic wages are pathetic. So yes she's after something, but with what I would say are valid reasons, so it's all seen as part of the game.

These are superficial encounters and I cannot get sufficiently worked up about them to freak out. I suspect that a lot of NTs are simply not all that interested in these customer service type situations (sorry waitresses) and so the reaction to them is likely to be flat or else one plays along so as not to seem overly rude. That could mask a degree of annoyance on an NTs part and so I think you are right, because less of a deal is made, the frequency of annoyance may just appear less because it is masked.

At work or in a more personal setting it would be different. Overfriendliness would stand out a mile and would certainly make you wonder what the he**'s going on. But even in that setting you wouldn't necessarily freak out, just shake your head in a bemused way and perhaps look for eye contact from a colleague and raise your shoulders to them along the lines of, "what's with all the cheeriness here" if you think your colleague might also find this odd. So overall I still would guess NTs freak out about this sort of thing less often.

Let me know if this is closer to what you wanted to know. Apologies in advance if I've missed the point.

I think you pretty much got it, though I also wonder about frequency in the sense of how many people do it - commonality amongst NTs, in other words. Thanks for your answer. It does clarify things. I appreciate the effort you made in understanding what I meant and giving a clear, detailed answer.