How exactly do NT's make friends?

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Is there a secret code? I asked a family member and she said "it just happens naturally". What do they mean by this? How does it just happen naturally? What if it doesn't happen naturally? What are they doing that I am not doing?

from constantly spectating them (ugh, i'm always uneasy referring to NT'S as a 'them'), it seems like they bond more or less the same way many aspies do, via shared interests.....shared experiences or plans.

plus body language, of course. and more allusions to some pop culture...???

at least, that's how they may get to know each other once they have met. process of initial attraction are mostly beyond me...it's always seemed to me that such close friends or lovers, that i see together, may have needed to know each other since birth or have always been that close, since it is beyond me how such an intertwined pair of people were, at one point total strangers...

opposites may attract but they rarely stick.

whet i do, when i want to get to know someone and the interest is not mutual..i then force it. and it ends up being a waste of time..

They have the capability to enjoy social interaction for its own sake, meaning that they enjoy talking to people even though they aren't talking about much of anything, and they enjoy being in the presence of people even though they aren't really doing anything and barely know the people. Also, since they have intuitively absorbed social rituals, they not only effortlessly enact them, but are also able to enjoy them (despite the interaction being formulaic and shallow). That gets them through the beginning stages of the friendship.

Overall, their socializing style is generic rather than specific and individualized. This allows them to easily "connect" to many different people (not that I consider this a true connection), and from that point the relationships can become more intimate as they whittle down their networks of shallowly connected acquaintances to people who have more things in common.

This is more true for extroverts than it is for introverts, I think.

1) their less nervous
2) the are more knowledgeable about things that the majority of other people are into and so it's easier for them to have topics to talk about
3) they don't feel under the conceived notion that they are socialally challenged
4) they have an easier time reading body language

Magnets do.

Heh.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/16/nigerian-student-gay-marriage_n_3934518.html

It is not advisable to swallow more than one magnet.

I can relate to this.

Abed from the TV show Community in season 1 is a good example of one way an aspie can make friends. I definitely relate to it. You force people into a situation, overshare about yourself, and put on roles to fit in. Awesome. The NTs in that show would not be friends without him.

I don't know how NTs do it. But as an aspie, I do it my way, and I choose people carefully. I get bored easily, and I need someone who is low maintenance. I don't want to go shopping with them, and I may not see them for weeks on end because I am not in the mood to socialize. I do have friends like that, and I appreciate their patience.

Most of my friendships are from institutionalized groupings. My current batch of regular friends I see (not high school friends I only see once or twice a year when I go to my hometown) are in a role-playing group with me. We meet weekly to play our game, and that's it.

You can google "how to make friends" to see an NT model. I think it's similar, but they do different things and are more spontaneous. But you know you have a real friend when you overshare and they're OK with it.

I've made a good number of friends just by striking up discussions about my interests. It doesn't work with everybody, and it may not work as well for you if your interests aren't as "general" as mine (I'm into gaming, music, and computers, so I sort of have it easy in that sense), but it's worth a shot. I often amaze people with the insane amounts of useless trivia I'm able to memorize.

So, I'm not entirely sure how NTs make friends, and I'm not exactly sure why my method works either, but it's something I've found that seems to do the trick. If you don't succeed with the first person you try striking up a conversation with, try someone else.

An Aspie friend once described the way NTs interact as a form of binary system: he does this, therefore I do that. You learn to recognise certain social prompts (which become more complex as the nature of the relationship becomes more intimate) and respond to them in the appropriate way, drawing on a 'library' of responses. Thus, interacting with a waiter in a restaurant is easier than with a close friend or colleague. Over time, NTs learn to identify a vast range of often almost imperceptible nuances of body language, such as facial or eye expressions, tone of voice, posture, gestures etc, although they frequently misjudge these in much the same way as autistics. But this friend of mine was very isolated and had very little social interaction, so this is possibly just his take on it.

More poetically, he described NTs as being like a small boat that is able to go bow or stern down, to raise or lower the sails or heave to port or starboard depending on the wind, tide or the load it is carrying - i.e.: according to the nature of the relationship or the direction the conversation is taking. By contrast, a lot of people with ASD are like a two-dimensional boat that is unable to alter its course or position and can only respond in a limited number of ways.

This is a fascinating subject that could be explored ad infinitum. I know people on the autism spectrum who are more at ease in social situations than many NTs, so there is no definitive answer.

Being at ease in social situations is not the same thing as, nor a necessary precursor to, making friends. A lot of people on the spectrum are completely socially oblivious; that may result in them being socially at ease, but it is also a huge detriment to making friends.

by being social.
and getting out.
and socializing.

Interacting with NTs 101

For NTs 60% of communication is non-verbal. This involves facial cues, hand gestures, tone of voice etc...

Secondly there is a process of breaking the ice involving small talk. This involves often pointless chit chat that serves to increase social bond in order to gauge if the conversation can go further into something serious.

Thank you for this, a very valid point. The people I was thinking of, who are generally socially at ease, do manage to make some friends, so in their case it seems to work. But as with all things relating to autism it's best not to make hard and fast rules, people on the spectrum are as diverse as NTs, if not more so.

I am an introvert NT and this is a good description of what I have always done and see other NTs doing. There really is a funneling process from broad and generic to narrow and specific. The difference between myself and extrovert NTs seems to be that the extroverts start with a much larger base of shallow and generic interactions and also winnow down less aggressively than an introvert, maintaining a large pool of shallow acquintances that the introvert doesn't maintain.

My neighbor is a good example. She is an extrovert NT who has a shallow acquaintance with pretty much everybody within a 3 block radius. It is amazing to watch her in action- remembering names, remembering names of their kids, asking about their specific health problems which she also remembers. In comparison, my shallow acquaintance pool only extends a few houses up and down the street and my close friend pool in the neighborhood is just her and my other adjacent neighbor.

Sometimes extrovert aspies write on here with problems that seem pretty specific to their extroversion. Instead of a funnel going from broad and shallow to narrow and specific, they are treating everyone as being on the same intimacy plane and attempting close connections to people who are expecting to be in the broad/shallow category and are put off by what they see as oversharing.

This is also an increasingly common behaviour pattern with NTs, as is evidenced by reality TV shows and the wider trend for discussing intimate areas of your life with total strangers, either in social situations or to a large audience in, for instance, a media interview. Or baring your soul on a social network. However, the crucial difference in these situations is that the recipients, or audience, seem to revel in hearing all this private information.

That is true. Google tells me that 'overshare' came into popular use in 2008. It seems to have started in 2000-something and then gained traction as the phenomenon got more common. Social media gave it a huge boost and now there is a generation gap whereby older people (like myself) hold back more and younger people share more and tend to overshare to their detriment (potential employers decide not to hire them because of damaging info they posted on facebook).

Does this make today's young extrovert aspies have a less hard time of it than they would have if they were born 30 years earlier? I don't know. For all I know, the NTs doing this are running into difficulties too. Employers not hiring them because of facebook overshares is the most publicized example but there might be others when people don't want to be an audience.