How to get on with Neurotypicals

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Essentially yes, the benefits for them of having relationships aren't always direct and probably aren't direct in most cases. It can just be not having to sit at home with nothing to do, or learning about a new restaurant or club.

Which in all honesty, is a bit of a foreign concept to me as to why one would want to spend so much time doing it, but it's clearly not so transactional. At least not with otherwise healthy people.

I believe neurotypicals seem the same on the outside (I don't mean physical appearance) but inside they are all unique human beings with their own thoughts, feelings, fears, woes, habits, etc etc. I usually find this out when I get to know people.

Like my boyfriend's niece has always seemed like a very extroverted NT with lots of skills and confidence, but the more I got to know her the more I discovered that life does get her down sometimes and although she's in her 30s she still hasn't settled properly in a job for more than a couple of years at a time, and left her previous job because she got bullied. She's a very nice person as well.

So the key is to just know that nobody's perfect, but whatever you do people will always judge you or talk about you. As long as you don't know they're talking about you then it's OK - in the NT world anyway. Yes that may not make sense to other Aspies but it's reality.

Anyway, I'm sticking with the rules in my first comment, they work for me

Ever since people started moving out of villages and into cities the evolution of NT transactional relationships began to emerge. When you don't know people you build trusts through trade/mutual benefit. At a certain point in the friendship the relationship reaches an equilibrium so the original transactional nature of the relationship becomes background (e.g. buying drinks in the pub, throwing $10 petrol money for a guys trip etc etc)

But back in the village we had a sense of duty to our collective community, a feeling belonging and a sense of duty that I'm afraid doesn't exist in the workplace, schools or in the burbs, That's why it's common for older retired NTs to move back to the countryside to seek out local community where they find a sense of belonging. One is willing to support your neighbor when they are need and don't expect anything in return.

I thought autistics were the ones who only had friendships with people who can directly benefit them, and NT friendships were all about clicking with each other?

5 minute friends you meet at the bus-stop or temporary acquaintances in the pub can be people who click but long lasting friendship has to have more mutual benefit.

Friends with mutual benefits?
Noice.

* offer them money somehow -- it might work *

Aha! Proof that community is best! Human society has got worse over the centuries. No wonder people are lonely and can't find friends anymore- because the sense of community is dying/ almost gone.

Maybe that's what I should try- being transactional and hoping it leads to friendship? I've been doing it 'the wrong way round.' Trying to find something in common with people and THEN doing things to help them/expecting them to help me in return.

How extremely sad that is. What a sad bunch homo sapiens are.

btw, there is no sense of community in the countryside now. Everyone is too busy working and spending time on the internet here too.

Traditional villages died out during the dawn of the industrial age in the 1800s. But they still hold some faint memory of community in some form.

Only if you've lived there for decades and/or are related to people in the village. Newcomers or strangers never get included. Their community just includes people who they know well. Unfortunately, or maybe that's just my weird village.

I was watching a documentary on the gaelic residents of a small Scottish island on the south-west coast of Scotland (I think it was called "Islay"). The BBC reporter described the island residents as the most fiercely parochial in all of Britain, a local gaelic dialect was the main lingua franca and English most definitely a 2nd language.

I thought of them because anyone not related by blood and unable to speak the dialect were quite rudely referred to as "incomers". The reporter asked the village head lady (who had a very long gaelic name) why outsiders/newcomers were called "incomers", She said it's because 1000 years ago the Vikings invaded their little island and killed most of the inhabitants. Those that survived were forever scarred by the experience and were wary of outsiders and clung fiercely to their Gaelic heritage.

Because of their isolation and lack of intermarriage over 1000 years a UK University wanted to do a DNA analysis of the population (around several thousand islanders), Instead of gaelic, the entire population was almost 100% Scandanavian origin on their male side. It turned out the local story was correct, except it seems instead of surviving and repopulating the island, the Viking men actually settled there and displaced the men and took the all Scottish women (a rather typical Viking story).

When the residents discovered they were carrying a 1000 year old hatred for their own ancestors it would be an understatement to say they were embarrassed. Obviously what happened is the children of the viking "incomers" threw out their father's language and adopted gaelic and over time completely forget their own history.

Don't. Neurotypicals don't accept us, so don't bother with them. I haven't bothered with neurotypicals for about a year at this point (ever since I got fired from my most recent job in May of last year).

Fair enough. NTs intransigence to tolerate differences in people can be challenging to cope with. I think in a strange way this converges with the threads on dating where some NT women aren't willing to overlook small flaws in NT men. The reality is you can't lock yourself away from NTs forever,

There's a principle called "regression to the mean". My daughter goes to a mainstream school where she mixes with NTs but her preference is to drift back toward people who are more like her (students with some form of difference whether it be a learning disability or being non-binary) because she isn't judged so much. But I tell her she needs to be prepared when she goes to college and workforce that she will need to practice getting on with NTs.

"The forum that shall not be named."

I recently had an incident where I was overly open and friendly, in a professional situation.
At the end of the interaction, it became "obvious" I was trying to "crack onto" him.
"Water off a duck's bad."

NTs be crazy...

crack on to...him?