[kala83]

so I keep getting told by my boyfriend that...there is certain ways....things in social circles work...

but it seems like way too much for me to wrap my head around....

like for one thing there are two of his male friends that i am getting to know and that i wish to become friends with...and it seem like we are friends....

but then when I try to ask them to add me as friends on facebook they don't.....I don't understand how this works what so ever..

Or apparently there is a unspoken rule.....its a good thing for couples to hang out with other couples. But it can make a single friend feel awkward or like a third wheel I guess if you are hanging out with them.... when you both are together.

its depressing for me cause it seems like building and maintaining friendships comes fairly easily for my boyfriend david and for me I am just kind of left in the dark...trying to do things as best I can..

[ManOfConstantSorrow]

I have no idea either, but can David not explain/help, rather than just commenting rather unhelpfully?

[muffinhead]

I've found that there are usually people who can appreciate me for who I am, and I hope it's that way for you as well. I frankly don't give a flying **** about social graces or small conventions involving social interaction, unless it is absolutely essential to my well being, and despite this still have friends.

[snickie]

I can understand your situation, as I'm often in something similar (I don't have a boyfriend now, but it did apply when I did have one). I'm the person who's not comfortable being around friends of my friend that I'm not friends with. I try but there's just some kind of a mental block that keeps me from really being able to connect with them.

That being said, there's something to be said for habits, especially since Aspies are creatures of habit. I've trained myself ("Hi, how are you?" "I'm doing well. How are you?" "I'm good." "Good!" *smiles and hopes it doesn't look condescending*) so I can generally get along with people in these situations but it's still very difficult unless I find myself one-on-one with them.

Originally Posted by ManOfConstantSorrow

I have no idea either, but can David not explain/help, rather than just commenting rather unhelpfully?

I think it's like one of those cases where someone has been doing something for so long and are so good at it that they find it hard to explain to someone who can't do it.

For normal/neuro-typical people, socializing and all that goes with it is second nature, for us with ASD it's a confusing thing and we essentially remain social novices our whole lives.

It gets hard because that normal person feels he/she has to really break everything down to the real bare basics and I think normal people are just too far advanced to do that. Furthermore, I don't think social talent (not merely skill) is actually something you can teach or really explain (despite the numerous books that claim to do so - it's just training, but normal people are literally "naturals").

I think, though this is just my opinion, that normal people don't merely just possess social skills. The word skill implies something that you learn, but if I (an autist), for example, simply observe normal people I can clearly see it's more than mere skill, it's more like a "gift" or "talent" because they are just such naturals at socializing.

It's the same as everything else in life. Any layman can become fairly proficient in the law for example, so he can have a basic understanding of it and know just enough to get by in whatever legal situation he finds himself in. However, the lawyer is set apart from the layman because he has that added something, a gift or talent for understanding and applying the law, he truly KNOWS the law and plays a different ballgame with a different set of rules all together.

Why it becomes an issue is the isolation aspect of autism. You see where "gifted" people are normally associated with the exception rather than the rule, social "talent" is so distributed that the socially gifted are the rule rather than the exception, purely due to numbers. Remember, it is frequent, regular occurrence of something that makes people define it as the "norm". It just so happens (call it a cruel trick of nature, or whatever) that being socially gifted (we usually see being gifted as being exceptional) is something that is a very regular occurrence, and I think people forget that there can be someone who doesn't have that gift. When something happens regularly, people take it for granted and forget that the case of non-occurrence can also happen and then when it does, they're kind of unprepared for it and deal with it rather shockingly in my opinion. But, you can't blame them, yes, it is weird or unusual, so... and understanding is about the best thing one can do .

But, that DOES NOT make the autist any less of a human being than anyone else! And, I find we tend to forget that we have gifts they'll NEVER have. We too are gifted, very gifted, just in a different way, and there's nothing wrong with that.

The problem is the numbers game. You see, take a normal person, X1 and say he/she has 100 friends in total. Let's say 1 out of that 100 is a person with autism, let's call him Y, and let's call the other 99 normal friends X2 to X99 (I know, just bear with me ). X1 can easily lose Y and still have many friends (99 of them, X2-X99) and be more or less the same amount of happy, because X1 doesn't have the time or patience to deal with Y's special needs, and decides it's easier and less effort to cut Y out then to deal with Y. But, looking from Y's perspective, even if Y too had 100 friends (unlikely but for the sake of sameness), autism is so unique that they are all likely to be X-type (normal people). Now, you see, Y's friends who are X's can easily turn around and all take the same approach as X1 did, no harm done to them because that specific X still has the 99 other X's to keep them happy, and if you take it, Y being autistic never really enriched the X's lives in the way they felt it should be enriched. So, X's stay happy, but Y gets totally isolated.

That's always been the problem, us as autistic people have always needed to play the normal people's social games if we want friends in our lives, they don't have to play our ballgame because if they fail at being our friend, they simply cut us out and chalk it up as a loss of 1 versus 999 wins, which still makes them a winner. I mean, who cares about one red apple in a barrel of 1000 green ones, right? Just toss it out.

I'm sorry, I don't mean to be cynical, but sometimes I feel as though normal people will never understand what we go through on a daily basis trying to live in the world they created.