When you meet other aspies...

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I find it easier to talk to aspies and half my school friends are. When I first met my aspie best friend I straight away felt comfprtable around him and we made close friends with eacother really fast. I think I get on better with aspies because I don't feel pressured to look in their eyes or follow small talk rules I can just do and say what I want.
My NT friends took a bit longer to make but I still get on with them just as well.

i never met anyone who had AS that i was aware of.
i think it is rarer than many people think.
i have met LFA/MFA/HFA autistics, but i never met anyone who is like me that i suspected was AS, let alone met anyone who claimed they had AS.

I went to two meetups once with other aspies here in Perth. Not very sucessfull. I don't know if the group is still going but I stopped getting texts about it.

I was really quite nervous because it was my chance to make a few friends. In the end as the "new guy" they just asked me about my AS all day and it was not really very comfortable. On the second meet up we went past a used book store (which I can not pass because it is an invaluable source of obsessional goodies) and got a book on bone studies of fossilised hominids (see profile for relevance to obsession) and spent the rest of the "meet" wishing I was at home so I could read it.

I kinda wish they were still going but. All in all the interactions were on par with others. Definitely felt less "judged" but still, not very successful.

I'd say it depends for me. I have became friends with quite a few aspies and I find it easier to socialise with them, but I still must admit I can still have difficulty talking to some aspies.

Depends on interests, really. I know one other aspie, and we have a few key interests that makes talking pretty easy. But we both suffer from paranoia apart that can get in the way of our getting together to actually talk. It doesn't help that there was a two month period where he kept trying to call me up to hang out, and he managed to somehow always call on days I was already doing something. My schedule's almost always wide open. His precision was uncanny.

When I meet other aspies, I feel normal. It is the only time I ever feel normal.

I find it easier interacting with Aspies too.

It's a serious encumbrance for me that people have a sarcastic or dry sense of humour, that I'm expected to respond to, for example at work. This doesn't happen when I'm interacting with Aspies.

It's a serious encumbrance for me that people are oversocial and have an intense manner of interaction, which overwhelms me, for example at church. This doesn't happen when I'm interacting with Aspies.

Having said that, meeting some Aspies can be a little challenging as it is hard to establish contact with some of them for obvious reasons of social interaction challenges. But still contact comes a bit more easily and naturally in the long run.

In general, I do better with other Aspies than I do with NT's. Same goes for relationships. However, as I'm sure you've noticed, there ARE certain problems that arise between Aspies that aren't necessarily as much of an issue when one person is NT.

I think it can be a bit strange. Also because when you go to "meet" other aspies it isn't like you are just running into them and trying to strike a conversation up. They are actually there to obsentisbly... MEET NEW PEOPLE.

I know the three aspies that i've met if I just ran into them on the street I would be as likely to talk to them as I would any other person. It was quite disapointing to go to the trouble to prepate to actually meet new people, and then have it not succeed.

Yes there are a lot of NTs that I identify.

I was no diagnosed till later in life so not knowing about my aspergers probably helped in a sense that I did feel like an NT. I just wasn't the outgoing type who could pull off a conversation as quick as some of the "regulars".

I've known some NTs to come off stereotypically aspie-ish. So it doesn't really make a difference to me. Then again, I've never met another aspie and even if I did, I don't think I'd have the ability to tell since some people with HFA aren't obvious like meself.

The last person I went to school with who had - unknown to me - AS bullied me severely for being autistic. That counts as hard I'd think. And that person is probably the only AS bully around here. But for whatever reason I had to run into him instead of all the probably normal autistic people. Yeah my luck haha

One of my NT friends has just found out about my aspiedom, and the funny thing is he is friends with 2 of y aspie friends and we hang out with eachother every day. and now he's found out he's the only NT in the group heehee he's been outnumbered!

Communicating with other aspies does remind me how I am myself - reserved, suspicious and not good at physical communication. A bit unnerving, but at the same time something I can identify with.

That's interesting. When I was doing a Music Therapy module I studied Autism and I found it very difficult to read the case studies. It wasn't that they were in complicated language, but it reminded me too much of myself and made me so uncomfortable.

I find that I've become a "selective mute," but my best friend is also an aspie (or so I think). It's great because we share the same obsessions and understand how each other thinks so well that we don't even need to talk. Or if we do, we rarely use full sentences, instead completing each others' sentences. When I try to talk to a NT, I have to remind myself constantly that I need to elaborate and can't leave out all the little stuff.

I think I'd just rather meet aspies and surround myself with them.

H'mm...Over the years, from eight through thirteen, the friends I successively made were five girls whom now, in retrospect, I identify as aspies or aspie-ish. We were together by default: no-one else would have us. We got along well then, but as I grew up I seemed to become more socially skilled than they; also, in the natural way of things, as I've grown older I've come to care more about really having things in common with my friends beyond social deficits. I still have an idea how three of these girls are doing. One is very awkward and odd, so that I feel pained for her but also slightly repelled, the way a sympathetic NT might feel. The other two are also noticeably awkward and odd, just less so, and are into the Harry Potter alternate universe, 'fanfic', 'shipping', cheesy fantasy novels and films and so forth. The one who's still my friend expects me to share these enthusiasms, but they're just...too juvenile for me, really. I mean, I do dabble in that sort of thing occasionally, but it's for a laugh; I don't take it seriously the way she does. A lot of the novels I like are basically the thinking woman's slashfic, but they're still Serious Literature, and then, here I am developing an interest in formal logic and film technique and so on and my aspie friend isn't advancing that way. Sometimes I take over for her in social situations the way my NT friends do for me.

When I was in high school there were a couple-three aspie or aspie-ish boys I knew, and I got along better with them than with the aspie/aspie-ish girls, because even though I'm a girl myself I found their perseverations more interesting and their humour more enjoyable. We 'got' each other up to a point, and would bounce jokes off each other, but we didn't become friends or anything close to friends; they hung out together and I made friends with a few nice NT girls. Currently I find my most congenial company in highly academic older adults.