Flaky Aspie rant

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My friend and I both have a lot of autistic traits. It makes friendship such hard work. In fact if it wasn't so annoying and infuriating, it would be funny.

Has anyone else tried this kind of dual autistic friendship and have some advice or stories?

I've been very flaky* in the past and never been good at maintaining friendships because I never realised or wanted to put in the effort required. Now I sometimes try. [* Flaky: unreliable, avoidant, prone to cancelling at the last minute - that kind of flaky]

So I have this friend who is a lot like me. We are eccentric in many of the same ways. The one annoying thing is when I want to hang out. I suggest something and get an enthusiastic response, then dead silence when I try to organise when and where. The other thing is getting no response at all. The good thing about your average NT is that mostly they tell you if they don't want to or can't or want to cancel. My flaky Aspie friend just goes quiet until the time has passed then gets back in contact eventually.

What's funny about this is that I have done this to people in the past, so I know exactly what's going on and that I'm getting a big dose of my own medicine.

I want to be that friend I never had when I was flaky. This would be a friend who understands how I am and doesn't take personal offence at my flakiness but just absorbs it without worrying and is still glad to see me the next week.

But I am finding out, on the other side, that when you take a chance to initiate something it's really painful to be ignored and have no control over things like when the friendship will resume and whether you'll spend any time together.

So there's my rant. It's so frustrating My choices are to take it and feel angry and hurt like this, or to quietly exit our friendship and be just like all those failed NT friends I've had in the past. I'm annoyed that I even invested enough into this friendship to start having silly NT reactions like feeling hurt. This stupid friendship is turning me into a big fat NT marshmallow. I hate it!

The moral of my story is this: Be nice to your friends if you are lucky enough to have one or more. If there is a friend you're avoiding because of some imagined anxiety, be brave and get in touch. Don't do this to your friends. Good friends hurt when you ignore, avoid or flake out on them.

I can identify with this. Even when I understand the underlying motivations of someone's actions, I still feel pain about it. I hope everything works out for you.

Yeah, I've kinda been in this situation, we both ended up majorly pissing each other off. One time he listed the reasons why I annoyed him and a lot of them were my aspie traits. And the reasons why he annoyed him, id say was not so much his aspie traits but his aspieness probably did play a part in this. Aspie or not, he was an jerk, idiot whatever. Yeah that didnt go down so well.

I was friends with another aspie in the past. Our friendship was ehh rather dry and the connection was somewhat forced. Our aspieness kept us from making a true connection. I look back on things, he was defiantly more severely aspie then I am, considering this age. He admitted to that. I think by now I probably surpassed him even tho Im much younger then him.

Yeah, getting a dose of your own medicine. Happened to me too. Like karma!
I also used to disappear on people, and now it upsets me when others do that, although at least I understand why that happens and sometimes I don't get upset too much. Just a little bit.
I used to avoid responsibilities, expect others to do certain things, without letting them know that I am not going to do this or that, so someone else needs to do it instead of me. Now I'm getting a dose of that too.
And generally, I used to think that if there's something that I don't want to do, then I don't have to do it. Now, in a relationship, I've learned the need to think differently.

But what frustrates me the most, is that I HAVE learned these things eventually, but my partner still hasn't, and refuses to learn, even though I repeatedly ask him to. And even worse, my partner is less of an aspie than I am... Shouldn't it be easier for him?