Do aspies reject other people?

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Yes, I have. There's the saying "beggars cant be choosers", but even with my limited selection of folks who want to be around me I have sent a few packing. One girl just started acting like we were close friends when I only knew her a little from one class and a little superficial as well so I never accepted any of her requests to hang out. Another girl was really nice but I just didn't think we had much common ground.

If I'm going to bother to invest the time, energy, trial and error and possibile humiliation of rejection into making a friendship, it needs to be with someone whose company I truly enjoy and can see us having mutual interests/hobbies to overlap. Having to keep hanging out with someone when you have nothing left to say is so awkward and frustrating and that too has happened to me on multiple occassions.

re: aspies rejecting other people----
I don't think it;s done by malicious intent. I think we may avoid a lot of social contact because it is mentally draining and physically tiring. I need to get away from people after about 1 hour of being around them....just to rest and recharge.

Also, some Aspies may have a lower tolerance for what I call "ping-pong people". I say this with all due respect for loud, chaotic, frenetic-type people who "bounce off the walls" as a way of being...... but they drive me nuts. Simply as a matter of sanity and survival, I can't be around them. (My cousin comes to mind......very frenetic woman.)

I enjoy people. I like hanging out with a crowd and getting to know as many people as possible. But I just have a hard time getting close to people. I have a very hard time developing a close friendship and that's probably what keeps quite a few others away from me. I think I can earn many aquantances. As for rejecting people, I really only reject people if they're purposely infecting me with a negative attitude or trying to change who I am.

I have rejected friends. Aspies are not so desperate for friends that anyone will do. Many Aspies have become quite comfortable without friends.

Yes, yes I do.

I reject people if they question my morels too much/make me want to hurt little girls more....

Hense why I joined this place to seek help with understanding others.

....Or so I would think?

If only I had the chance of rejecting friendship. Most of us aren't that lucky.

I can't say I've ever rejected someone's friendship, though I do frequently lose touch with people because I don't feel like putting in the effort--- this is probably a defense mechanism after years of rejection myself. I prefer to be alone; I have a couple of close friends but I only enjoy being around them for a day at the most. The only person I can be around constantly with no anxiety is my husband...who is interestingly, not an Aspie. I just get frustrated/anxious when I'm around anyone for long periods of time... like...talking is exhausting, or something, so I avoid the scenario in general.

I probably have rejected people passively. Actively, not really. It's more I "accept" their requests and then it dies if things don't work out as we hoped.

Not actively usually as I like to try and see the best in people, unfortunately as someone once told me 'you bring out the worst in people' and I still do with most people as I meet with more rudeness from people than my neurotypical friends do! If I put the time and energy in, I can make lots of acquaintances but they all fall away so I don't do that any more. I have a few friends I see every few months and I can't understand why they still see me when everyone else has given up or doesn't like me. I have rejected family members that are nasty and abusive and 'friends' that I discovered actually don't think much of me so I try to carve out a world where I am totally comfortable without the need for close friends (which I think I have) but I do keep my over-trusting eye out for a nice friend, I know there's someone out there, probably an Aspie. I did correspond with someone on this website but my rejection switch went on when a few things didn't sound right and I wondered if it was someone who guessed my identity and was playing with me (I do feel a bit guilty though). That's the result of a lot of embarassment and hurt trying to be friends with the wrong people! So yes, I think Aspie's do but only out of self-defence. We're tough cookies but can only take so much crap!

I used to be in a place in which I was rather desperate for interaction when I first became social. Once I became more mindful of guarding my personal resources, I noticed that people took me for granted much less often and respected me more. Now I typically have offers for conversation and casual interaction that honestly outweigh my ability; so, I have the capacity now to pick and choose people I hang out with and socialize with on a regular basis. It's amazing how often the average person will overlook abusing the boundaries of a person who doesn't know how to defend them. And I've almost come to believe that in many cases, it's simply a thoughtless blunder that one has conditioned them into by allowing that sort of thing to happen.

Now there are some people I reject, and usually for good reason. Any aptitude I gained for socialization, I only gained through sheer (and painful) repetition. I'd say it was something else, but more than anything, it was making myself available, developing a somewhat humorous personality, and teaching people not to take advantage of me by establishing boundaries. It used to be difficult to say no in many cases, but now it's often automatic. This process has honestly made me more likely to reject people out of hand due to past experience, but I've decided not to worry too much over mistakes.

People have complained that I am somewhat dismissive of others but I've had people reject me too so in my experience it's been both ways.

S

I do sometimes but its normally out of insecurity and/or I see them as a threat in some kind of way. Majority of the time what happens is that I come off as very anti-social. People think I'm deliberately being anti-social but in reality, I'm just being very awkward. The more awkward situations get, the more quieter and socially closed off I get. I need be able to relax for me to be social or else I close off very easily. I've complained many times that Im horrible and small short bits of unstructured small talk and NTs seem to rely heavily on that to break the ice in the early stages of acquintanceship. But I can decently hold a good conversation. It throws people off a lot of the time.

For me, people just drift away over time. I'm used to it now, and frankly don't care at this point to obtain any more unless they are the ones interested in being my friend. I have 3 permanent friends that I've had since early childhood, and all of them are aware that I distance myself sometimes due to mental exhaustion. As for the people who drift away, they would start giving excuses for why they can't see me, and that just got extremely irritating. But if I have to see friends every waking moment, it's just too much. I'm far more interested in a relationship with a woman than trying to obtain a thousand "acquaintances".

this!

and..

I am aware, or atleast I have learned to be aware, of that never initiating contact might seem like rejection. An older friend of mine has told me she had the same problems, so what she did was basicly writing down in her tablet schedule when to initiate contact with friends. She had little to no social network around the age of 30, now at the age of 40 she has ~20 close friends. Simply by learning how to build and keeping relationships and using her "booksmarts" in action. It can be learned people, don't get discouraged.

I have yet to implement this into my own life, but I do keep it in mind for the day when I feel I am ready to explore such things. Lets say she has one circle of friends she wants to keep in touch with once a month, and another circle she wants to talk to once a year. Input 12 dates for each friend in a calendar for when you want to call them up, and 1 date for each of the other friends. Make it somewhat random plus/minus 5 days for monthly, and +-60days for the annual calls. And perhaps skip calling them a month if your friend initiated contact that month.

She also said something interesting about building a relationship. Even if you are curious about how your VERY new friends dead mother died, don't ask about it the first time to meet for a cup of coffee. Start with the weather, work up towards their darkest secrets over many many meetups. It's a dance, you share some and you recieve some info. Small talk is actually a crutial part of building a relationship.

Knowing all this in theory is one thing, putting it to good use in an actual setting, is much harder.

Even if I know if a friendship works because of interest, maybe some other factor bothers the other person such as age, race, interests, discrimination, pressure from family/parents, etc. Sometimes aspies have good intentions, but they never initiate and have to be begged to the point where you don't have any energy left. Or, they only "want to be in groups of people" and some use that as an excuse or a crutch to not feel too pressured in a more 1-1 situation.

I rejected everyone who asked me to hang out in middle school, despite desperately wanting friends. I was just incredibly anxious about hanging out with new people, especially after being snubbed so often in grade school. Now, no one bothers approaching me anymore. Oops. I need to work on that.