Have you ever...

Post Reply New Topic

I'm certainly guilty of assuming an acquaintance was my best friend. I tend to do that a lot, (online especially.) I'm not sure how many people that's chased away, but I'm sure more than one. It's just tough when I have that need to talk and talk and talk, yet I rarely find anyone to listen. More accurately I refuse to tell anyone I'm close to anything important about me, so the result is that I tell people I barely known everything about me.

Regarding whether people turn gay:
They don't.
People start out relatively bisexual (this is a result of biology) - as a result of life experience they develop an orientation one way or another. Someone can be primarily gay and because of their environment, say, a fundamentalist christian home, reject the idea of gay and live as a heterosexual. A paradigm shifting experience could cause them to decide to live as gay. Or not. Some people have experiences that cause them to live as gay and again, a paradigm shift causes another choice. This is why people say its not a choice.

A good example is height. Let's say you were born short. You live amongst tall people. Your parents devise things to help you live as a tall person. You have a negative experience with a tall person and decide to live as a short person. You never were a tall person, but you lived as one. We can't say that you changed from tall to short. We can say that for a time you chose to live as a tall person, and now have chosen to live as a short person. We could say that you changed from tall to short, but that would not be true.

A lot of people don't know their orientation and discover it in the course of dating. I think this is what happened to you. Don't let anyone tell you that you turned someone gay. It's just another way to hurt people. No one has that much power.[/b]

And regarding boundaries: I think this is a big problem for ASCs. I have done this any number of times with disastrous results. And in the same way, I have ignored people who were interested in me because I could not tell what was their intent.
Sometimes it is a matter of going too fast. NTs don't want to hear the whole life story all at once, yet I feel they should know what they're getting into if they are considering a relationship with me. They also don't want to hear anything negative right away.
I have found that things from other fields are helpful in managing these issues. Perhaps I will write adaptations for ASCs. At any rate, with regards to boundaries, I have found the relationship addiction literature to be helpful. It gives advice on moderating one's interactions so the other person isn't scared away. And it gives advice on moderating one's expectations so that the ASC all or nothing schema doesn't have as much influence on one's feelings.
I currently am taking a break from relationship pursuits as I have to devote my energy to other things right now.

Yes, since such things have happened to me a little too often, especially in high school and just out of high school, I've found that even though I don't quite know where the boundaries lie I try to do everything in moderation and be overly careful. Playing it safe.

Not that this is a perfect solution. But at least the other person stays around. I am either too close or too far. But I prefer the latter than the former. Fewer disasterous results.

Yeah, I have. And it hurts too much to talk about it.

There's also the flip side, where I became so trustingly attached and didn't have adequate boundaries, so the other person overstepped their bounds and that wrecked the relationship.

You're born gay or you aren't.

Your person that "turned" gay would be bisexual at the most, or had always been gay.

I've had this problem all my life. When I was a little girl, I had no idea why nobody wanted to be my friend. By adolescence, I discovered that I was best in a one-on-one situtation with a friend. Group things were impossible for me. Unfortunately, most other teens seem to prefer being in a group, and my first best friend got tired of me wanting to be her only friend. To this day I have a problem allowing people to have other friends. It's not good, I know, but that's how I am. I really have to make an effort to not be overprotective. I also have a tendency to share either too much or too little about myself, which causes problems. I agree with what everyone has been saying about boundaries - they are really important, and it's difficult for me with AS to know the right boundary at the right time. I tend to cocoon, which is not the best way to make friends.

On a side note, has anybody else noticed how NT's who are mean and bit$%y are frequently very popular????