How do you tell if someone is your friend?

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So lately I've been practicing social skills and I'm somewhat successful. How do I tell if someone wants to be your friend? In real life it isn't quite as simple as in games where you ask, "Hey, wanna add me to your friends list?" I find it awkward to ask, "Do you consider me a friend?" I had just started to interact successfully with a certain three peers that were merely my classmates before.

will the person suck out the posion from a snake bite on your rear?

Look at

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~alistai ... index.html

in the section "Finding the right friends"

He provides a table explaining the differences between true friends, false friends and enemies.

Another good article: http://www.wikihow.com/Identify-a-False-Friend

It's not a black and and white either you're friend or you're not thing. There are types and degrees of friendship. It's more how much and what kind of friend someone is.

I think, as I understand it, with NTs, it's not so much a wanting to be friends. It's more, seeing a person as a friend, and then taking another step in friendship. Like people may be work-friends, and then they decide to get together for something outside of work.

I think my usual method, well, how they act. If they act like a friend, they are a friend, at whatever level they show friendship. Works reasonably well for the most part. I think sometimes I miss things, but I have enough friends for my tastes. Didn't work so well with one aspie-ish musician I know. Uneven relationship, plus aspie traits, equals too much acceptance of uneven friendship for me to figure out where I stood with him. Until I finally figured out he's okay with unevenness and lack of reciprocity is not rejection, with him.

I guess my expectation of reciprocity is an NT trait, so maybe that's easier for me than it would be for others here, but, still, it's pretty open to conscious observation, seems to me, not something that needs to be done intuitively.

I think maybe the trick is, take little steps to see what the boundaries of the friendship are.

According to the Survival guide, I can't be a 'true' friend to others & don't know anybody who does almost any of it, regularly. For instance, one 'friend' I'd not heard from for a long time recently contacted me. After a little catching up, it turns out he's doing a maths course & wants my help with it. According to the article, I should be suspicious of that timing?

I would consider somebody a friend if I went places with them and had them over to my house and talked on the phone to them. But see, I don't want to do any of that stuff. It gets on my nerves. If I could limit it all to maybe ten minutes at a time then I'd want a ton of friends. However people want to stay and stay and talk and talk and all that. I did enjoy hanging out constantly with my one friend who is dead now, but she and I were freinds since sixth grade and we could do that thing where it's comfortable to just not say anything for hours. I'd go to her house and she would sit in the livingroom and watch tv and sometimes I'd go to her room and read or listen to the stereo. We didn't have to be together and interacting constantly, which people seem to want to do.

A real friend will help you get rid of the body.

PaganMom

NTs backstab each other all the time. No one can always tell who's a true friend and who isn't. If the question is simply "Would this person want to hang out with me?", only time will tell.

Depends ... it could also mean that that person respects you a lot for your skills and the knowledge that they need help gave the impulse to actually talk to you again, because it is really awkward for most people to make contact to people they haven't talked to for a long time. I personally don't mind helping out a bit, even if the other person vanishes again because though it wasn't for friendship, it still means it's the other person's turn to do a favour for me.

I agree with eggman and mysty..

Edit: I kinda disagree with #5 on that "how to identify a fake friend" list.. lots of times I seem to ignore things 'cause I don't know how to respond or something like that.. I don't think it means anything other than that I don't know how to respond to something.

I still can't do the things Marc says a 'true' friend does &, thus, can't apply those criteria to others!

Friendship seems to be something invisible, you can't touch it either. It's not clear to me what the difference is between a friend and a collegue with whom go out with. Well I am only going out with my collegua's because I think I should. It's called socialising, but with me it's more wall flowering. I look and I listen or else I dream.

Potentially, a colleague could also be a friend; the two categories aren't mutually exclusive! Somebody else can explain these things to you &, maybe, answer my question, please!?

I have issues with figuring this out too. I feel like I consider some people friends, but they only consider me an acquaintance, so they don't ask me to hang out or anything.

I have a lot of aquaitances I consider 'casual friends' - usually classmates who I still see now and again, maybe once in a few months, and a few 'serious' friends or close friends that I hang out with.

I think with that comes a sense of loyalty and connection, that you'll stick up for each other and won't abandon the other person when it's convenient for you. For me that is the most important mark of a 'true' friendship. I find like any relationship it also comes with trust, and if that trust is repeatedly broken than perhaps you're not real friends.

Nobody seems to agree what 'trust' means. Bit of a problem, as all say it's important to relationship! Usual trick of something being important but what it means isn't!