Am I Boring?

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I'm trying to troubleshoot the reason for why most of my friendships and romantic relationships seem to end with the other person losing interest and wandering off. I doubt that I say many things or do many things that or offensive or turn-offs. More often, I get the feeling that I'm losing their attention, and that I have to compete for their attention with a bunch of other things. Eventually they seem to just lose interest in me.

Is it because I go on an on about myself and my own interests? No, I rarely talk about physics or surfing or any of my other hobbies or interests unless other people ask about them.

Is it because I never ask them about themselves? No, I make a concerted effort to ask other people about important things in their lives and topics that interest them, and I try to talk to them about those events and topics.

Is it because I'm a bad conversationalist with no opinions and nothing interesting to say? No, I think I'm a pretty good conversationalist because I've spent many years trying to become so.

So what is it that makes someone interesting? And do I lack that? Do I need to take a few hints from The Most Interesting Man in the World?

I often look for deeper psychological reasons for these kinds of problems. One thing I do know is that we seek out people and situations that feel familiar to us. We are often drawn to people who remind us of important people from our past, including our parents, siblings, and influential friends. In a sense, an "interesting person" is a familiar person, a person who reminds us of important people from our past.

It's possible that my autism, however subtle it would be because I've become pretty skilled at masking it, would feel unfamiliar to someone who has never had an autistic family member or friend. Other people might report feeling bored, but what they really felt was a lack of familiarity.

Any thoughts?

You seem like an interesting person to me. People like to be around similar people. Maybe that could be it. Also, if people see someone act in a way that seems different to them, they tend to drift away. I was having a bad day at school one day in Grade 6. I had a meltdown and said a whole bunch of things in the heat of the moment. My regular peers in that class would have nothing to do with me after that, no matter how many times I apologized. It made going to school and to that class that much more dreadful.

Thanks Another thing I've been reading about recently is the "attention economy" where the scarcest commodity is now considered to be not land, or gold, or even money, but attention. And attention is the thing that businesses, and individuals, are now competing for. So it may also be true that the a person is considered "interesting" in direct proportion to their ability to get and keep people's attention. In the attention economy, even negative attention is still attention and is better than no attention, so many people get attention through being extreme, contrarian, and unconventional. If I want to be "interesting" I may have to work a little harder and being able to get people's attention.

Maybe they notice that you're trying too hard to please them when what they're interested in is a more honest relationship?

Just a theory.

I used to be quite the approval-seeker, and I used to try make sure that everything I said was inoffensive and I made sure not to step on anyone's toes. Now I've gone all the way to the other side, where I'm super authentic to the point of straight up saying what I think in ways that might be taken as offensive. I might want to back off of that a little bit.

Friendship involves a strong sense of empathy. We like to feel that people understand us so well that they could finish our sentences sometimes, and describe us in ways we would agree with that we have not used ourselves. Friends can be counted on to care about what happens to us, and help when we are in a jam. Usually I don't feel at ease with people if we don't laugh at the same things, or if they can't tell when I'm kidding. Unfortunately, many of your age group struggle with traditional friendship, never having had much practice dealing with real faces in real time.