Needing contact... but not wanting it

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I have hit a low patch recently, struggling to cope and feeling very isolated which always tends to lead me to the thoughts “if only I had a friend, I’d have someone to talk to and lean on at times like this...” and I imagine how things will be better when I finally meet someone who would fill that role. It’s a bit of a cycle for me so I have been here many times before.
This time though I’m thinking to myself actually I don’t think I’m ever going to have that kind of closeness with someone. I should mention here that I am happily married - but we are both loners so we happily let each other live fairly separate lives occasionally having lengthy meeting of minds discussing politics or meaning of life stuff- most of the time this is enough for me, but providing emotional or mental support is not a natural instinct for my partner and at times like this, that’s what I crave.
It feels indescribably lonely. I grew up in a lonely family, I’m living in a lonely family and whilst I might long for connection I actually can’t sustain the necessary friendship stuff to support such a connection. It just feels kind of futile. I’m generally an optimistic person, but with this knowledge I wonder what is the point?

Does anyone else share these feelings? Has anyone felt like this but then later found they were able to make a real friend who they could allow themselves to rely on at times? Did you find the capacity to be there for them (something that seems to totally push me over the edge of impossibility)?

I think all these years the friend I’ve been hoping for is actually my imaginary friend made real-not someone who exists within their own right as a human. It sounds horribly selfish. Which is probably why I haven’t admitted it to myself fully before.

When I’m not feeling so bad, I can’t really see the point of friends, I’m happier on my own. Does anyone know if it’s even possible to have a real friend when those are your true feelings? Can I somehow learn how to be a friend and therefore have a friend?

This is very common within Autistic spectrum disorders. The feeling of isolation comes from our difficulty with establishing social connections, and having social emotions specifically.

The belief that people with AS have a less expansive range of emotion is completely false. That would be a sociopath. Instead, we simply just lack the ingrained neurological mechanisms necessary to create a feeling of wholeness in our interpersonal interaction. It's like being able to feel emotion, but the brain will not send the right cues when one is interacting interpersonally with someone else, or fail to produce them at all. In this way, it does share a small amount of similarity with other disorders, especially depression or psychotic spectrum disorders, which limit interpersonal contact.

Just like how a social species (everything from humans to primates to ants) need social interaction in order to literally stay healthy, all species also need food. Seeing as food is a need, like social interaction, a comparable disorder regarding the need of food as opposed to social interaction is Prader-Willi syndrome, which results in constant hunger and a never ending desire to eat, as well as a slower metabolism. Despite eating, the person may have actually had that need met already and will have no idea how hungry they are. Aspergers is like a constant isolation, with a desire to maintain personal contacts but the inability to do so, and on top of that often a lack of desire to initiate a relationship and issues with processing stimuli from many sources at once.

Though I don't really have any friends at the moment, I think a remedy to this issue is a bonding exercise, like traveling or enduring a common type of hardship with the same people. Ideologies are also useful, a group that shares the same sentiments or the same "identity". The more you need/know each other, the closer your ties get with the group. Living in a small town, as opposed to an urban area, is also useful in establishing ties, if you can find a way to get past the initial town's fear of outsiders. Make sure to avoid any toxic people, but it is possible to find the right person, or even more than one.