Socially aware enough to know you mess up

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I have problems making conversation with people who don't share my interests. I do try hard though. I've learned the hard way not to go on and on about my pet subjects. I can make small talk with someone who is prepared to meet me half way but I lack a lot of the life experience that a person my age might be expected to have (buying a house, having children and so on).

I think what I'm saying is acceptable. It sounds like the sort of thing other people say but somehow it just doesn't seem to be good enough. Perhaps it is my (lack of) expression or the intonation of my voice or my body language or my physical appearance. It's much harder to change these things than to learn small talk.

I find it difficult to talk to men who are only interested in sport (which seems to be most of them). They will say something like "what team do you support?" and if I reply that if I say that I don't follow football that's it - game over. They pretty much don't want to talk to me any more about any subject. I can ask who they support, how are they doing this season etc but again that just isn't good enough.

From a young age I realised something was off. I only really started to understand what was wrong a few years ago when I looked into Autism. In some ways it has helped as I have started to look for clues and adapt to try and keep things more like a conversation, but there are still issues.

* As it is learnt rather than innate I just forget to look a lot of the time resulting in awkward or dull conversations where I end up feeling uncomfortable
* Some of the signals are still to ambiguous to me (as the OP said people tend to be more clear with their negative ones so you misunderstand a few, get confused and then get a very, very clear sign that they don't want to talk to you anymore).
* Sometimes the surroundings and such just over whelm you and so you can't concentrate well enough so again just end up annoying people.

I think most people can work on this and get a bit better, but I'm not sure it is possible to master. I still get times where I get down and annoyed with myself and want to avoid certain people as I know we can't interact well . Once you get in that type of relationship with someone then you are really against it as I found that they already have a negative image of you so make it harder instead of easier and you can just sense that you are not wanted, but can't be sure why.

I always figured that someone is bored or uninterested, if during a conversation, they simply changed the subject (from something I wanted to talk about to something different). I never considered that (changing the topic) confusing. Rather I found it frustrating. Especially, when I get involved in a topic I really want to discuss.

Generally, I have found in social situations the following:
a) I typically have nothing valuable to add to during the course of a conversation
b) When I do have something to add, the other person isn't really interested (as the subject quickly changes to something else)

This is why I prefer discussions in the work setting. At least we can discuss something, in depth, on a topic everyone has some level of "interest" in (where that "interest" could simply be "self interest" in terms of maintaining employ-ability).