Friendships

As an autistic person I've always struggled to make friends. That's not to say I've never had friends because I absolutely have, but the few friendships I somehow managed to make were mostly temporary and often circumstantial. I had a couple of friends at college but as soon as we graduated we pretty much stopped talking to each other. When I was at school I had a couple of friends who I spent pretty much all my time with, but didn't make friends with anyone outside of our little group of 3 until much later on in the final year of school. Looking back now they weren't all they were cracked up to be as friends, but I enjoyed what I had.

I think one of the reasons that I've never found it easy to make friends is because my special interests have never matched up with what anybody else was interested in so I didn't have anything to talk about. I've always found it hard to know what to say to other people, especially if I don't know them. Similarly, if I see anybody I haven't seen in ages I struggle to know what to say there too, which is why I don't like meeting up with people I haven't seen in years. It's like my head reverts back to them being complete strangers and I start getting anxious, even though I'm a lot more comfortable with those exact same people if I see or hear from them on a regular basis. I wouldn't go as far as saying it makes me more socially competent, but it makes me more comfortable if nothing else.

I think my definition of friendship has changed as well as I've grown older. When I was younger I used to define a friend as somebody I would be happy to go out to a pub with for example. I once explained to some colleagues at one of my old work places that there are lots of people working there who I like and get one with, but nobody I would consider a friend. There were only a handful of people at the time who I would have happy gone on a night out with, and there are even less of them these days. Nothing against most of the people I knew or work/ed with, it's just that I don't value most people's company as much as spending some quiet time on my own in peace.

Nowadays I've come to realise that I wouldn't even necessarily want to go on a night out with a friend. For example, my current team leader at work is probably the closest thing in-work that I've got to a friend. I help her with a few work bits and she's really been there for me when I needed her, brought me out of my shell and massively helped me raise my game at work. I'll be sad to lose her as my team leader when things at work change over the next couple of months, but we'll still be around to see each other which I'm glad about but that doesn't mean I'd want to go on a night out with her. I feel more comfortable going out as a team so that there are at least a few other people there meaning I can fade into the background when I need to. Just as another quick example, there's my friend Emma who I met on Twitter (you can check out her mental health blog here). We've never met in person and I can't say I'm overly keen to change that, but we've got a couple of things in common and we've tried to be there for each other when we needed it so I consider her a friend even though we don't talk online that much.

Going back to my friendships being circumstantial for a minute, almost all of my nights out when I was single had a purpose. That was to get me out and about and hopefully meet someone to start a romantic relationship with. Of course it never worked until I met my wife when I wasn't even trying to (I had bigger things to worry about that night), and it's not that I didn't like being around my friends and have fun because I really did, but for me the centre of every night out was putting myself out there to find love. Looking back, my friends did put up with a lot from me and I appreciate them being there because the search for love in itself became somewhat of an autistic special interest consuming almost every part of my life - which ironically is probably a reason it didn't work! I met my wife one night when I was doing stand-up comedy and was too preoccupied with my set and how badly it failed to worry about meeting anyone, but I did. My comedy group was another set of friends who I almost immediately fell out of touch with as soon as I started working full time and got together with Sarah so I didn't have the time to commit to the actual comedy any more like I used to.

I guess at the core of what I'm trying to say is that I don't gain anything from sociable interaction. It could either be because I'm autistic, or because I'd learned due to bullying etc that I'm better off staying reasonably isolated, or it could be a mix of both. I often wonder what neurotypicals get out of socialising with each other, and especially from small talk. To me, talking to people is a way to get information. I really don't believe that I need or want 90% of the information that people seem to give and take from each other but for some reason that I'll never understand they enjoy it. A perfect conversation for me is if one of us asks for information or an outcome, the other one gives it, and that's the end of it, we both go about our day. I feel very similarly about reading as well. It's rare that I'll ready anything for the enjoyment of it, but if it's something I want or need to know then I'll end up reading everything that I can find about it.

So that's how my autistic mind is with friendships. I'm sure a lot of autistics will likely agree with me, and so I hope it's given you an interesting insight into how we - or at least I - tick. If so, please click Subscribe at the top of the page and follow me on social media. I'm @DepictDave on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and you can buy me a coffee at my Ko-Fi account here.

[Image description: A handshake between a black hand and a white hand. The image is on a white background with "Autism" towards the bottom in rainbow colours, and "Friendships" under that in black.]