Being friends after a breakup

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If someone used to have interest and enthusiasm for you, then someone probably will have that again. Something a lot of aspies (regardless of gender) do wrong is either coming of as too pushy or too cold (I sometimes make the latter mistake).

Usually when I break up with someone I just want to cut them out of my life completely and don't have any interest in being friends.

My ex and I have kids together and we're cordial but not friends. He tried to be friends with me but I wasn't interested and he didn't take too kindly to that but I'm not really one to appease people.

I guess that depends on how the relationship formed in the first place, how and why it broke up, and what the people's beliefs were about the relationship while it lasted.

In the NYC lesbian and bisexual communities of the 1980's and 1990's, it was commonly desired and expected that ex-lovers would remain close friends if at all possible. (I'm not sure if this is still true, because my last relationship with a woman ended in the mid-1990's, and the friends I made back then have all either died or drifted apart since then.) Moreover, it was considered highly desirable for a woman to introduce her new lover into the friendship network consisting of her ex-lovers and their current and former lovers and the latter's current and former lovers, etc.

Such a friendship network was regarded as an extremely valuable alternative extended family, partly because, back then at least, many lesbians and bisexual women were estranged from their biological families due to anti-lesbian prejudice. Thus, for example, when a friend/ex-lover of mine was in the hospital, another friend/ex-lover of hers was the one who called me up and told me about it so we could all go visit her and otherwise attend to her needs.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 06 Aug 2019, 4:49 pm, edited 2 times in total.

My definition of friendship differs from yours then. If one of my friends ended up in the hospital I wouldn't hear it from an ex because I'm in contact with my friends on a very regular basis and would know what was going on. What you describe sounds more like keeping acquaintances.

When love is involved, I've never had a lover who would be happy with me giving an ex a few hours of my time each week and I think friends require time and regular contact which sounds like what the OP is putting forward.

Back then I generally stayed in touch with my friends (including some though not all ex-lovers) by phone. I had a telephone head set, so I could talk on the phone while doing routine, easily auto-pilotable chores such as washing dishes, so the phone calls didn't eat up a lot of time that I wouldn't have been spending on the chores themselves anyway. (This is the kind of multi-tasking that even a person like me who generally is extremely bad at multi-tasking may be able to do.)

We didn't schedule much if any individual getting-together time, though we often ran into each other in the same group meetings, etc., either in-person or (later) online. But our phone conversations often delved deeply into topics of common interest; they weren't just keeping-up-with-acquantances kinds of calls.

I'm wondering about this after being dumped by a long-term boyfriend recently. I don't think we'll be able to be friends, as much as that grieves me. But, in my experience, the friendship often fizzles out anyway after one or more parties move on to a new relationship and the new partners become jealous.

I think it depends on the couple, their reasons for the breakup, and the expectations of both people. I'm still good friends with an ex-boyfriend, but he's gay and that takes the awkward chemistry away. It also makes it easier for our new partners to understand the relationship without feeling uncomfortable.

Do you mean the same person will have interest again or that a new interested person will come along?

I didn't have a long term relationship with this person, so it might be easier to stay friends. This is one of the first aspies I've met in real life who is as high functioning as me. We have so much in common that it would be a huge loss to let the friendship go.

But I still have warm fuzzy feelings about him and that's really difficult to cope with. Sometimes I just want to hug him, which is weird because I'm not a hugging person.

I've never felt so tangled up with someone before.

Although the changing the friendship to a romantic thing was a very short thing it was the most emotional, awful breakup of my life. I just didn't expect the be hit with so much confusing emotion, not from myself, but from him. It was really intense.

It's still a bit awkward trying to make conversation in person. Messaging is less intense, often fun. But I can hardly look at him when we talk now because it's too much.

Do you think it would be a good idea to make a temporary agreement with him to avoid talking to with each other in person, but to stay in touch via messaging?

No, that's not what want. I actually want to meet up and talk things over.

New interested people will come. Don't waste time on your ex.

The purpose of the crush is to make people put down a lot of effort to form a connection, and the crush will naturally fade when the connection is getting strong enough (or when you have given up). In the absence of a crush, people will give up on each other over minor trivialities (just look at how dating typically works). The absence of a crush when you already are friends means the connection won't get stronger (which might be ok if you already have a strong connection).



26 years and still counting.



Yes, I'm married since 26 years, but we are only in a companionship since a while back.



I find intimate friendships off-putting and wrong. Intimacy is for romantic relationships, not friendships. I don't think ND people are incapable of intimate friendships, but they are not natural for them.



I think it just shows that crushes create strong connections that people have trouble getting out of. That's how it should be. When people have no connection they can just leave at any time, and that's highly undesirable when you are in a romantic relationship. In essence, you need to put in some emotional involvement (like a crush) into a potential relationship for it to be worthwhile. That's why dating is not worthwhile as it doesn't require any emotional involvement at all.



That might work for you that can handle NT-style friendships with an intimate connection. It seems most of the difference would be in also having sex. For me, a friendship is more like a companionship with no intimate involvement and no regular contact. That's not a suitable start of a relationship.



It works with all the kinds of intimacy I desire. Actually, it makes the difference between being asexual and sexual too.



I think the main issue is that I cannot have emotional intimacy without having a mind-to-mind connection. The mind-to-mind connection requires a lot of effort to create, and so I won't bother with that unless I have a crush.

I disagree. If an erotic dimension is added to what was already a close friendship, that will likely make the connection quite a bit stronger. At least that's what has happened in my experience. (Admittedly not quite to the point of a "mind-to-mind communcation link," but, as far as I can tell, most autistic people don't experience those in relationships with other autistic people either.)

On the other hand, there seem to be a lot of people out there who, apparently, never manage to form a strong connection with another person despite having a crush. For many people, their crushes are one-way; the other person just isn't interested. Hence, for many people, a propensity for crushes results only in an extremely high probability of heartbreak.

But even for those few people lucky enough to form a relationship of some kind with the person they have a crush on, the crush in many cases does NOT result in a genuine connection, but instead results in idealization of the other person. Furthermore, they mistake the crush for love itself, so, when the crush fades, they conclude that their love is gone and it's time to move on.


That's great!


I don't agree that intimate friendships are inherently unnatural for NDs.

Most (though not all) of my intimate friendships have been with people who I now believe were probably autistic or otherwise neurodivergent. And these friendships formed in ways that felt very natural to all of us at the time.

But I think your belief has a grain of truth. What I am inclined to believe is that autistic people's social and emotional development is slower than that of NTs, so that, by the time we are capable of developing intimate relationships of any kind at all, we have already reached puberty -- whereas NTs, or at least NT girls, become capable of emotional intimacy a little before they reach puberty. For that and other reasons, NT girls are more likely to have had the opportunity to experience emotionally intimate platonic friendships before they reach the point of desiring an erotic/romantic relationship. So it's quite possible that, for many autistic young people, and for many NT boys too, their hormones are already raging before they even realize that there's such a thing as emotional intimacy. So, it might not even occur to them to seek emotional intimacy outside the context of an erotic/romantic relationship, since their desire for sex is much more intense.

So, what made me different from many other autistic people in this regard? When I reached puberty, I had highly unusual erotic fantasies -- so unusual that I did not even think of them as "erotic" or "sexual" but thought they were just another one of my many weird quirks. Hence I did not immediately start desiring erotic/romantic relationships. So, even though I didn't become capable of emotional intimacy until after puberty, I nevertheless had a window of time in which to begin desiring emotionally intimate platonic friendships before I began to desire or experience erotic/romantic relationships. And the close friends I made in my twenties and early thirties were almost all, like myself, people with highly unusual erotic tastes.

As noted above, even a lot of NT boys don't develop emotionally intimate relationships before puberty. Hence even a lot of NT men (at least here in the U.S.A.) don't spontaneously seek emotionally intimate platonic friendships. However, many societies have traditional ways of creating emotionally intimate friendships among NT men. In the U.S.A., college fraternities are one way of doing this, though not nearly as common as they used to be. Among older men, fraternal organizations such as the Freemasons used to be popular. There are also other kinds of organizations, including some religious and spiritual organizations, that foster emotionally intimate friendships regardless of sex/gender.

So, even among NT men, emotionally intimate committed platonic friendship can often be an acquired taste rather than something they seek spontaneously. Yet, having tasted it, they highly value it.

As I said above, I suspect that many autistic people don't spontaneously seek emotionally intimate platonic friendships for the same reason many NT men don't either, namely, that their hormones kicked in before they began desiring emotional intimacy of any kind.

But it seems to me that, as with NT men, there probably are ways to enable autistic people to form -- and then highly value -- emotionally intimate friendships. NT-style fraternities and sororities (yuck!) can't do this for autistic people, and besides they wouldn't want us as members anyway, so we will need to find other, more individualized and generally more autistic-friendly ways of accomplishing something similar.


But a sufficiently deep platonic friendship does entail an emotional connection too, and is not something you just leave at any time either. My point is that I want an erotic/romantic relationship to be rooted in an already-deep friendship that will outlast the erotic/romantic dimension in the event that the latter does not work out well for whatever reason. So, if a crush means that the friendship must be discarded in the event that the erotic/romantic dimension doesn't work, then I don't want a crush. I value committed intimate friendships above all else, above any erotic/romantic dimension, though the latter can be very nice and can greatly deepen the relationship.


Agreed on the need for emotional involvement. For me that gets built up gradually via friendship.


I wouldn't call my friendships "NT-style," given my personal history.


The kind of companionship you speak of, intellectual companionship, is for me the first in a series of steps toward a more intimate friendship. Indeed, for me it's a necessary first step.


I'm not sure I understand that last sentence and how it relates to the rest of what you wrote. Are you saying that, for you, an absence of any need for verbal communication is a prerequisite to having sex?


As you may have noticed, most of us don't believe that a true "mind-to-mind connection" can even exist, much less be a reasonable sine qua non of emotional intimacy.

Anyhow, please see also my reply to you here.

Too me it seems like you have some kind of crush on him. The things you describe sounds like signs of infatuation.

At least for me, but for others too, you simply cannot add sexual intercourse to ANYTHING (friendship or relationship), since I find that pretty disgusting. Just like you, I have pretty unusual erotic preferences.



I think it is possible to learn when a crush is worthwhile or not, and how to quickly terminate it when it is not.



At least for NDs, there is empirical evidence that infatuation results in stronger attachment.



That's an unfortunate mistake, but sure, it does happen.



It would be interesting to study your intimate friendship process more in detail. I'm not saying it won't work for some autistics, but it probably requires some specific traits to work, and some specific attitude towards friendships that you have that other people might not have. For instance, I notice that you are bisexual, and therefore that some of these friendships might have been same-sex or unusual in other ways. Things are also generally a bit special in the LGBT community, and those things might not translate so well to other settings.

I don't think the emotional intimate friendship aspect differences between genders or neurotypes is based on sex-hormones or sociology. Male friendships among NTs are often with other males and the objective is not to talk about feelings, rather these typically act as ways to climb in the social hierarchy (networking). It's mostly among NT women that gossip is a major function. ND women more often have friends compared to ND men, but I think this is also an innate issue just like among NTs. ND women will team up because it had a natural function, while ND men typically won't since it didn't have a natural function.

Also, for a friendship to become a potential relationship (assuming you are straight), it must be between different genders, something that is also a bit unusual among NTs, but more common among NDs.



Rather that having a mind-to-mind connection is a prerequisite for having good sex. I used to identify as asexual, but I'm not asexual if I have a mind-to-mind connection, rather then I become hypersexual. I might even enjoy the more typical ways of having sex in that setting.