Am I a "High-Maintenance" Friend?

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I have an email buddy I've kept in touch with for about 8 months. We were messaging every couple of days for awhile; recently she started going a week or two between replies. But I still reply to her messages within a day or so. When I asked her about it, she said I give the impression that I am "high-maintenance" because of my quick replies, and it implies I want contact every day. And even if I say I don't expect an immediate reply back, my actions speak louder than words.

I'm very irritated by this, because it's only natural for me to reply quickly. I do that with everyone. I have very few people emailing me, and hardly any real life friends, so if there's a message in my inbox, I'm not going to let it sit. My friend suggested it makes me anxious to let a message sit for a few days. I just feel it's unnatural and phony to impose a "waiting period" on myself if I have something to say.

At the very least, I don't feel welcome to send immediate replies to this friend anymore. But I am wondering, do most people see it this way, and do I really come off as overzealous by making prompt replies?

I think I am the same. I can't say yet whether all NTs do this, but it seems that they do not have the same set of values when communicating.

I have a friend who will act like this

10:27: Hi, how are you doing?
10:27:30: ??
10:28: ??
10:28:30:??


Maybe she has some things going on in her life that she can't always reply right away. I know often if I'm on AIM, I might run into the kitchen for a minute to get something, and I"ll come back to like 50 "??" messages.

I actually prefer to reply immediately as otherwise i forget. So i personally would not take it as a bad thing to reply immediately. But then i have never really had any one reply to my emails immediately, other than my brother. So i dont know if anybody replies immediately. But no one has been as rude as to tell me that they find it "high maintenance" as i reply immediately most of the time (the only time i dont reply immediately is when i am in my "no talk zone").

My take would be, you like to reply immediately, you do that. If he or she likes to wait, let them. They cannot complain about you. With me, there are some i figured out who will not reply till 1-2 month after my reply. With them, i actually put them into "acquaintance" category, so essentially people with whom i dont expect anything fruitful in terms of interaction.

I usually reply pretty quickly. If someone chooses to not reply for certain periods of time, I just choose not to bother with that person again.

I'm high-maintenance... so probably as a friend I can be too...

I know I'm an irritating person, "high-maintenance" if you will, and I hate myself for it. Honestly, if you did nothing between e-mails but ask her why she didn't respond quicker, then you should apologize profusely. Hell, even if you didn't that you should apologize and promise to wait longer between e-mail, because nine-times-out-of-ten, when a NT is upset with an AS, it's the AS who's at fault.

It really depends on the situation. With this situation, maybe? I mean, it's not like you actually know this person in real-life and it's just a "pen pal" it sounds like. Now, if it were someone you knew personally, that would probably be a different story. I mean, when I'm texting my friends, on both sides, sometimes we'll respond right away, and sometimes we won't. It also depends on the person. I can understand how some people who find it needy.

I'm glad you worked it out with your friend.

Generally speaking, I find that if one friend seems to be reaching out more often, always taking the initiative, it can sometimes be perceived as desperate/creepy/stalkerish. I try to adjust, according to how the other person behaves, so that I'm not always initiating. Particularly for opposite-sex friends.

If I initiated the conversation then I would write back frequently, or as soon as I see something sitting there in my inbox. If someone else initiated the first message, then I would usually take my time to figure out if I want to reply, and if so, what do I say. It is interesting when someone else initiates it. Interesting because it is new and unexpected.

I would say it is normal for us, because we have so little communication with others, and we tend to hyper focus on a person quite quickly. Perhaps hyper focus is seen as needy by the receiving person?

Speaking as a NT with many aspie friends and family members, I can say that it's very useful when an aspie friend doesn't try to be too "NT Subtle" with their social skills because then things get confusing pretty quickly. It's better if 1) the other person knows that either you're on the spectrum or you the sort of person that does things in an X,Y,Z way, and 2) once that's established, you just lay things out matter of fact when something confusing is going on, like "Hey, actually I do this for my memory" or "It bothers me to see unanswered emails, like a messy room". It sounds like that's what you did and it sounds like that worked, so there you go.

And what the other poster said about it automatically being the AS person's fault in social misunderstandings- that's not a good thing to say. It's like saying that White people are always racist. If everyone adopts that kind of attitude, we'll all just feel bad and hopeless and no progress toward neurodiversity will ever be made.