How difficult is making friends for you?

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With me, it always starts, progresses, and ends like this: I become interested in somebody, we may or may not have a mutual friendship, I make a mistake (e.g. saying the wrong thing), they start to avoid me, they don't forgive me.

Thoughts?

I seem to find it easier to make friends with non-NTs.
But if an NT is interested, especially a female, she will come over to me and chat, which I like, but no matter how friendly and polite I am and how interested I am in her, she will sort of back off a bit, and we will just forever remain acquaintances, not friends. We may add each other on Facebook but that's it, and if they don't post much stuff then I don't have much to like or comment on, and I feel too awkward to PM, and they rarely like or comment on the things I post on my news feed, so the acquaintanceship just stays like that.
I suppose I'm not interesting enough for NTs.

I'm sure you're looking for answers from people closer to your age, so I'll try not to make this too long. It's very hard, except on the rare occasions when someone approaches me in the first place, i.e. initiates a possible relationship. Those tend to be the kind of people who stick w/you for the long haul b/c they're interested in you and more likely to be tolerant of your eccentricities, faults or whatever you wanna call them. Not always, but often. Your experiences from how you briefly describe them sound like mine for the most part as well. It's hard to make, keep and deepen friendships w/people when they write you off as often as happens to people w/ASD. And I wanna make this point b/c it's important to keep in mind: it gets harder to make friends as you get older, if you haven't picked up a fair amount of social skills especially after college. You can see my age and b/c I haven't "developed" enough (according to NT standards), I don't have alot of friends and it's just much more difficult to make them I find than when I was in college, even high school. NT's typically harden once they hit their late 20s, early 30s and become less tolerant than younger people closer to your age or in their early-mid 20s. It's also harder b/c once you start working full time, everything changes in terms of people's goals, etc and if you fall too far behind as many ASD people do, NT's tend to think you're immature and/or don't take you seriously anymore.

I'll just finish by saying, try to work on your social skills development while you're still young, it can only help you be happier (assuming you wanna make and keep more friends) and it'll pay off later in life. Good luck!

Making them isn't hard. It's keeping them. I tend to alienate people over time.

I have a thread in the GAD sub-forum that is about NTs perceiving you as weird. This relates to what I said because I think that one of the reasons why I have trouble making NT friends is that I am perceived as strange and unusual by most NTs.

I think having the ability to forgive is a really great quality to possess. So long as it is not done in a way that is detrimental to themselves. I hope you can find someone that has the ability to overlook minor mistakes.

I've always fond it very difficult. I remember a swimming group I did via my mental health centre. A lot of the guys bonded together. I just ploughed through the pool trying to do as many lengths as I could. I was fixated on doing that rather than socialising in the pool. It wasn't many lengths as I'm a slow but steady swimmer. Needless to say I wasn't invited to the get togethers at a local pub. That kind of thing partially shows why I'm not good at making friends.

Do you realize you made a mistake before they start avoiding you? Is it possible you kind of shut down because you're responding negatively to something you thought you did wrong?

People make mistakes with people all the time. There are things you can do to kind of prepare people for it so they don't take it so hard (don't make claims you can't back up) and there are things you can do to recover (say sorry and quickly change the subject a lot of the time).

Well, I haven't made a friend in seven years, and I've never kept a friend for longer than two years before they started avoiding me, so I can't say that I have much useful advice. When I was a kid, I thought that it was because I was smaller than everyone else, that people only wanted to be friends who were their size (that was the only difference between us that I couldn't discover on my own), so once that person had their growth spurt, they would move on to find a friend who was their own size. It was a weird rationale, but I was a kid with zero social/emotional skills.

Now I'm a young adult with zero social/emotional skills. I can't say that things have improved, although I don't mind it as much these days. I've stopped thinking about building specific relationships with people and started focusing on developing myself into someone that I enjoy spending time with. You still need social interaction - don't get me wrong - but you don't necessarily need reciprocal friendship. Sometimes it's enough just to be friendly to the best of your ability and spend your energy focusing on yourself. I wish I'd known that when I was your age, because I wasted a lot of time being unhappy about something that frankly couldn't be helped. My social skills weren't going to improve. I should've focused on the things I could change and stopped obsessing over whether or not other people would reciprocate my friendship. Now I'm just friendly with everyone and I actually find it satisfying, even if I don't really "get" anything in return from the people I engage with.

Are you me? I.curently have 0 friends not that nobody has tried it just always ends the same.

VERY

I can only form a bond or attachment to someone if I have something in common with them and they don't mind hearing about meerkats or animals 24/7. If they don't and tell me to stop, they're usually very rude about it and it just reminds me of when my mom tried to make me stop talking about meerkats all the time and made me want to kill myself. For some reason I wasn't supposed to talk about what made me happy but everyone else was allowed to talk about what they liked 24/7. Eventually my mom just gave up and became a meerkat expert herself but that still doesn't change how she made me feel. I will NEVER let anyone have that kind of power over me AGAIN.

For years, the only person I considered a friend, the only person I considered a friend as a zoologist from South Africa who studies meerkats and even offered to hire me as an assistant researcher if I ever wanted to move to South Africa. IDK, he's kinda "hands off" with them. I want to pet them and cuddle them. I never understood how people could stand out there in the middle of nowhere for weeks (sometimes years) on end just looking at the animals. I don't even like zoos because they don't let you touch them. If I want to SEE meerkats, I'll look at a book or You Tube.

Anyhow, I found a boyfriend and had to warn him WAY before we were boyfriend and girlfriend that if he EVER told me to stop talking about meerkats and animals, he would be history. He understood. He has Asperger's too and understands what it's like to be told to shut up about the thing you love most by people who blab constantly about the same stupid s**t you've heard over and over.

But anyhow, if someone wants to be "friends" with me and tell me to shut up about about my special interests, they are NOT my friend. Not by any means. I never felt the need for friends even as a child. I even told my mom I didn't want "friends'. She didn't believe me and said "everyone wants friends. Even mean ol' boys'. That didn't make scene, all the "mean ol' boys" I knew had friends too...other "mean ol' boys". Actually GIRLS were meaner to me than boys.
I didn't want friends and was just brainwashed into thinking I needed them. I was never exactly told what I needed them for. I was happier when I realized I didn't need them and when I was alone. Because other people would tell me I talked about meerkats or animals too much. If I couldn't talk about them I wasn't happy. Why should I stay with someone who made me unhappy?

Hard to find them, easy to befriend them, hard to keep them.

The first part is society (not very many public places to go meet people randomly, people prefer being at home or work and people have become more close minded recently), the second part is due to my "masking", and the third part is due to my own inability to keep track of friends because I am often preoccupied. I want them and I do get lonely but not enough to spend all my time keeping track.

I'd much rather just have friends who like to do spontaneous things, not extremely organized or specific outings with a specific date. I want to call and go somewhere at that moment. I have the flexibility, most people do not.

I've always had very few friends offline & was bullied a lot as a kid. I don't really feel comfortable opening up to people offline until I've gotten to know/gotten used to them a bit & by then I think lots of people have written me off.

I'm sure if I wanted a friend I could motivate myself to do it but maintaining a friendship is hard work for me , the people IRL who are my friends are my GF & family members ( technically not friends ) and they tend to be more forgiving.

I feel like I have an easy time getting people to like me, but actually taking the step into being friends with them is very difficult. I don't have any close friends, and haven't for a long time, it feels bizarre to listen to other people talk about their lives, when they mention staying over at a friend's house, or spending the weekend partying with their circle of close friends. I used to have that kind of social net when I was in high school, but it feels like something from another life now.

Extremely difficult

They have different expectations from me

They violate my expectations

And vice versa

They are usually eager to peer pressure me to change

Or they just dump me


While I keep making the mistake of passive aggressively tolerating way too much BS






Cost benefit analysis


Risk vs reward



Punishment versus reward