I screwed up bad

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Has anyone said the wrong thing at the wrong time and hurt someone you truly care about?

Yup, enough times to know how bad it can be, yet I never learn. Is there any way an apology can sort your problem out? What did you do?

And it seems the people I care about the most, to them, I have this "gift" of intuitively saying the most cutting thing possible.
wonderful gift, eh.

Yeah, I've done that more times than I can count...

+1 here.

yeah. Quite a few times. I also complicate things by leaping to the defensive when people get angry at me, before considering whether or not I'm in the wrong. Trying to learn how to defuse emotions at the moment (mine as well as theirs).

Oh SO many times. And when I discover I have done this, it wounds my own feelings, and I want to go cry somewhere except I need to make it up to the person I offended. I seem to be very gifted at accomplishing this it seems. I guard my words and consider them very carefully before I speak, and I might edit my posts 15 different times before I leave it be just to avoid accidentally doing this, because I hate it when I discover I have done this, so badly.

I have, numerous times. I feel nothing but remorse.

Might or may not be related, but a song from a french singer i know came to mind:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qK5b0hQzSeU[/youtube]



For those who regret... <.<

I think I did something stupider than usual.

Things seemed to be working out so well with a girl I'd met at work. I'd struck up a random conversation with her the first day I'd met her, and everything seemed to go so well from there.

Then the job started a new project, and we got split up into two different buildings. We'd been talking through instant messages a little, but it's so busy. The other day, she didn't reply to the instant message, and I got a little worried that I'd said something wrong, but I decided not to push it - maybe she was just so busy she didn't get a chance to reply. Later that day we ran into each other, and she apologized for not replying, and explained that she was so busy she never had a chance. I believe she was being completely sincere, and said it's no problem at all, I understand.

She was off the last couple days, but at work today, and I figured I'd send her another instant message saying "good morning!", and decided it would be perfectly alright if she doesn't reply, because she's so busy. Again, we ran into each other, and she apologized again for being too busy to reply. And that's when I opened my big mouth.

I just wanted to assure her that I understood, and at the same time I wanted to assure her she had a way out in the event that I was just being creepy and giving her attention she didn't want, so I said "it's no problem, really. But please, if I'm bothering you, just tell me to leave you alone. Otherwise, I figure you're just busy. I know how busy things are right now, so it's alright."

It must not have come out right. I think the mixture of my half-baked grasp on my body language, tone of voice, and expression just didn't work out the way I'd intended, because even I could tell immediately that I'd said the wrong thing - she looked devastated. I'm still trying to piece together exactly what it must have looked like I was telling her, but it was definitely not what I'd intended.

I couldn't bear to see her reaction - before I'd said that, she was standing up tall and straight, but after I spoke, she seemed to shrink a couple inches, her shoulders dropped, she was shaking, and I thought she was going to cry. I don't remember what I said next, "I mean, you can just talk to me whenever you can, I'm alright with that, please don't worry", I don't know. I then did the next stupid thing - I walked away. I knew I'd just hurt her bad, and the only thing I wanted to do then was to go away and stop hurting her.

I'm kicking myself pretty hard right now. I looked for her later on to make sure I fixed things up again, but I didn't see her again.

So yeah, I've got a talent for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and hurting people I care about.

Yes.

The last few weeks have been a series of ups and downs for me, and I've been feeling pretty low since the events I mentioned above.

As much as I dislike long-distance communication these days, I'd sent an instant message to that girl afterwards because I didn't see her anywhere. I wrote something like this to her: "I hope you didn't misunderstand me, what I wanted to say didn't come out right. I just wanted you to know that writing to you makes me happy whether you have time to answer or not, and I'm just going to assume you just have your hands full and I'll keep writing unless you tell me otherwise. You're still one of my favorite people - have a great night ". Before I'd ever heard of Asperger's Syndrome or visited this website, I would never have been able to write anything like that, and, if I'd somehow wound up in a similar situation before, I would have been so ashamed of myself I would never have tried talking to her again. Heck, I probably wouldn't have been able to even talk to her in the first place.

Well, all my worrying seems to have been for nothing, becaue the next morning, she had sent me a reply: "Thanks, you too... you're great! I'll chat again later when things get quieter. I hope you're having a great day!"

I could almost have started singing and dancing! (And you can bet that if I had, it would have been some extremely awkward singing and dancing - luckily, I was shaking and blushing so much I couldn't even stand up or open my mouth to do so!)

I'm going to try asking her out this weekend, and it would be the first time in my entire life I've ever done that (I'm a thirty-something-year-old guy who has never once asked a girl out.) I've been waiting for an opportunity to ask her for the last couple weeks, and I think the opportunity is about to come up tomorrow so if it does, I am going to do it - I've convinced myself that she'll almost certainly turn me down, convinced myself until I'm perfectly alright with that; now, I'm simply looking forward to just asking her whether she turns me down or not; in a way, I'm almost more scared of her saying "yes", as I really don't know quite what I'll do next - if that somehow works out, I'll have to improvise as best as possible, and see what happens. Maybe that will work out, as the whole thing has been me improvising up until now anyway.

In any event, I don't feel so low anymore - this is the best I've felt in weeks!

Maybe those wrong things at the wrong time aren't always as bad as we think they are. We're so bad at reading reactions, maybe sometimes we're imagining we've screwed up worse than we really have, and by assuming the worst we're throwing away great opportunities. I'm so happy that this time I didn't just crawl under a rock and hide and beat myself up without trying to keep things going!

(Thank you, everyone at WrongPlanet, for sharing your own experiences for me to learn from!)

I always assume that people are mad at me. I have a hard time even just talking to people sometimes, let alone saying the right thing.

madducklover31:
Care to expand on that? (Everyone, AS or NT say the wrong things, or even outright hurtful things.)

Yagaloth:

She probably took that to mean something like "well, if you can't respond when I expect you to, then just don't bother". Or she could have heard "Things are busy things are right now, so it's alright if we just not talk anymore".

Either way, she wouldn't have been hurt if she isn't in to you.

Keep us updated...

Yes. Next time I'm forced to say 'I didn't mean to hurt you' I think I'll wear a 'I'm not rude I'm Autistic' T-Shirt.

Thank you. Those interpretations are pretty much what I imagine, too.

I asked her out to lunch as planned, and she turned me down as I'd expected, but in a far more ambiguous way than I'd been prepared for. That might be entirely from the ambiguous, cautious way I asked her, more than anything else (note to myself: that trick doesn't seem to work.) In any case, getting turned down wasn't nearly as bad as I would have expected this time last year. She didn't run away screaming when I asked her. I've been seeing a lot more of her since then, and she's been asking me more questions about myself than she did before, so I'm inclined to think asking her out and getting turned down didn't go all wrong after all.

I definitely got to this point a lot faster than I would have been entirely comfortable with - I usually like to move at a snail's pace, which seems to allow plenty of time for the girl to get bored and frustrated and look for someone who provides more immediate and satisfying participation (it usually takes me several months, maybe a year to just get warmed up, and by then it's too late.) It must be frustrating for a girl to get anything out of me normally, but when I am moving this fast, I feel like a bull in a china shop.

I'll give asking her out another try over the next week or two with a more direct approach and see what happens, and if that doesn't work out, I'll conclude I'm reading her all wrong and won't try to push things out of the "friend zone" any more with her until something changes dramatically. (The last thing in the world I want to do is move from "great" to "creepy stalker", so I've got to draw a line somewhere and say I'll have to accept that answer as a definite "NO", even if the answer seems vague at face value.)

Whether it works out or not, I'm still enjoying this a lot, as long as I don't make a complete cad of myself in the process. And if I do make a complete cad of myself, I'll be sure to provide the details here so that maybe someone else can learn from my mistakes.