Are your social skills "passable"?

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Last year, I would drag random strangers around to see something and then walk away, say someone's name repeatedly while they were talking to someone else to get their attention and then have stilted conversations with them and walk away quickly, and talk to myself in the hallways...

Now, I can initiate and carry on conversation much better, get people talking, etc. Granted, it's not natural at all and I still can't seem to form relationships, but my social skills have improved vastly... Have your skills improved to this point, and if so, when?

Probably. Except for some mild awkwardness in some situations.

What the main issue is right now is that I'm not in high school anymore - constant exposure to others helps my social skills and helps me maintain them.

So my social skills have decreased a bit from isolation and will take some time to be getting back into.

Also, I live in a dangerous city with a relatively high crime rate, so it doesn't help suspicious people are everywhere - makes overcoming my agoraphobia even harder.

Eye contact I always seem to need to work on, though. I do make eye contact, but it's apparently never enough.

I think mine have improved a lot since my teen years to a point where I just come off as shy and awkward. I still get my moments but I think mine are passable now. I still have a hard time with eye contact when people talk to me when I don't know them or feel comfortable with them. I don't talk much so I have no way of rambling or going on and on and I keep everything short when I talk and I don't talk about my interests and I don't approach people. They would have to talk to me first and approach me first. I also learned to have a better filter so I don't accidentally tattle anymore and I am better at asking things about another person without them being in the room like if I hear someone say something about another person and then I see them contradict themselves, I won't blurt out the question about it with that other person present until they are gone. I also don't go correcting people anymore and I do it in my head now. I think social anxiety helps even though it sucks and the fact I don't like confrontations so that makes it easier to hold back saying things without getting exhausted or driving myself crazy.

My social skills have been improving, although I still have some aspie tendencies that show through and I get worse at it when I am nervous (like when I try to talk to girls). I can pass as being rather normal most of the time.

I'm pretty awkward. People laugh at me.

But I would say I'm "passable" in the sense that I probably won't lose my job because of a lack of social skills.

My social skills are pretty good these days.
I'm almost unrecognisable from the past me if I speak on the phone.

It's when I'm put into hostile environments though that I begin to regress.

Diagnosed at 45 y.o., and even now some (ex-)friends think I'm just making it up. So I guess I'm "passable" enough to be mistaken for a slightly odd neuro-typical person most of the time (or someone on drugs, as I have been mistakenly accused of sometimes.)

Never found it easy to do, though. For years, I thought everyone else in the world must have super-fast mega-brains to be able to do all that sensory and emotional processing so much quicker than me!

Just reread your question.
My social skills really developed 18 months after my official diagnosis, which was in my mid 20's.
I think if I had an early diagnosis my life would have been very different, and funnily enough my social skills probably would be far worse as I would've been sheltered from the world and not exposed to it.

I have more natural social skills than the average Aspie, but that doesn't mean I am not awkward at times. Usually I'm "on time" with recognizing humour, but sometimes I can be a little slow at interpreting what has just been said to me. Luckily this is only sometimes.

I naturally pick up on non-verbal stuff like body language. But, word of advice to the Aspies who lack this ability, knowing body language isn't the be all and end all of social skills. I'm still socially awkward in other ways.

Passable for what? Normal? No. Only if the situation is a very basic and ordinary one, and I do very little talking. The more that I have to talk, the less normal I appear. And in unusual or new situations I am very awkward.

So people do not see me as normal. I'm not seen as autistic either, just very odd.

Mine have regressed through lack of practice. My husband and I used to live in Edinburgh, we had a (sort of) community, people we knew and could talk to, familiar places to go, a group we were involved with and we were ok, passable. Then we got the opportunity to buy a house but we couldn't afford to buy in town so we moved to Fife and all of a sudden we were uprooted and isolated needless to say it has been quite horrible and all we want to do now is sell up and move home but for various reasons that is difficult. Anyway, I started at University this year and I've barely spoken to anyone. I'd love to but I can't, I've forgotten how to do it I've started stuttering and stumbling over words like I used to when I was wee, my volume control has completely disappeared, I'm ackward, gauch and clumsy and I hate it. I used to get exhausted but at least I could get along, now I feel like an alien who doesn't know the language, customs, culture...anything. Keep practicing your skills, it gets easier with practice but if you lose them when you are older it seems (in my experience) much harder to get them back.

I gotta say, my social skills are not bad, not entirely awesome, but I am to socialize. I go to a social event at least once a week.

Think of social skills like a muscle that requires exercise. With continuous exercise it becomes stronger; however, too much at one time can result in hurting yourself.

The more experience you gain socialize = the better you become at socializing, but breaks are important so you don't feel overwhelmed. Eventually, the amount of time needed for these breaks lessens as socializing becomes easier and more comfortable

I started really pushing myself to socialise just before I started university, so I was 18 years old. I tried and failed over and over again, but did connect with one person (he eventually became my husband). Connecting with one person meant access to his friendship group, so I could 'socialise' at least with them. After university finished I cut myself off a lot again - our friends drifted off to their own lives, we moved to a new town, I spoke to people at my office job but wasn't really 'socialising'.

Then, I left my office job to run my own business as that suited me much better, but I did need business connections so I joined some networking groups and forced myself into those very awkward networking meetings where it's all business small talk and trying to describe what my business did and why people should use it. And that forced me to improve with the 'fake confidence'. Again, it's not what I'd call 'socialising' but it's a useful skill to have. In fact, just a month or two ago I went to see my husband at work and meet his new manager - I went in trying my absolute hardest with the conversation, sounding confident and making eye contact, and it did work. In fact, she apparently took him aside the next day to say that I was a great communicator, clearly passionate about what I do and far better at connecting with people than many other people she sees in my industry. Which is great news - it was a shock and made me a bit emotional - but at the same time I know that it's not natural. I had to be alert and on every single second for that conversation and was lucky it ended after a few minutes, because the moment my brain drifts for a second or I start to relax, the real me comes out and I say stupid things, repeat myself and quickly lose that 'confidence'.

Actually socialising with friends? I'm alright at that. I do have friends now (thanks to being a mum - it's great for building social links) and the closest friend I've made over the last 2 years does say that I don't come across as 'unusual' in any way, nothing standing out, but I've had my fair share of experiencing bulling over the past year and of being suddenly dropped by people that I thought I was getting on with, never to hear from them again. And I struggle every time with socialising, and do note that the longer we go on the more a huge group of 'mum friends' is giving way to smaller friendship groups that are going the way of the dodo where I'm concerned. As time goes on, I'm losing touch with more and more members of the big group that we started out as, and tend only to see five on a regular basis nowadays, but don't think that three of those five would miss me if I stopped making the effort to meet up.

I don't think it's ever going to be natural at all. I think it has to be endlessly forced. I have to force myself to invite myself along to things that I'm not comfortable going to (even if I want to be friends with these people). I have to pretend I'm liked when I really don't think I am, just to be able to force myself to go without feeling too devastated that nobody likes me. I have to force the conversation, force the good eye contact, force myself to speak up and to speak slowly, force myself to script and say the right things. I have to force myself to cope when people make or change plans last-minute. I have to force myself even around the person that I would consider to be a close friend, because I'm still so consciously aware of how easily I could mess that up. And I have to force myself, time and time again, to accept when people just disappear and not to get bothered by that and let it stop me from trying again.

But, with enough force, I'm passable long enough to form a basic friendship, then wait for it to crash and burn, then try again. And that's a big change from where I was at 17 years old!

I feel like mine aren't. I try yet fail a lot of the time. There are times when I'm okay. I managed to speak in front of a camera at a gala. It aired on television and from what I heard, I did okay.

Depends on the situation. If I'm with friends then I can literally bring up anything or be content with talking about anything.

If I'm in a room full of strangers, I get anxious. I don't like small talk and I have a very hard time hiding my boredom if people are just yaking the usual small talk talking points. I'm the kind of person who likes to ask personal questions, peoples opinions about life, etc. Stuff that is a little too high up on the conversation ladder for having just met someone. Most of my issues revolve around finding ways to break the ice with new people.

if i had to have a phone conversation no one in their right mind would ever think i was an Aspie, pretty much NT almost on the phone.

in person sure, i am passable, i smile, i talk ok, i have a hard time with eye contact but i normally look at their nose or forehead and it passable for eye contact. At work i pretty much dont start a conversation but if asked a question i can come up with a pretty good witty answer. I dress the part of the girls my age make up etc so i try to blend in the best i can.

i would say i am passable but it does exhaust me by the end of the day playing this game of "blending in"