Why are people so phony when they dont have to be?

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Going down in flames

Quit the stand-up and get yourself a day job that doesnt involve going to the welfare office on a daily basis.

No, I don't forgive you.
I'll be as mean as you.

I have a reputation to keep.

You won't look clingy if you simply drop the topic of the party into a regular conversation with her or her hubby. Something along the lines of "good party the other night, shame you missed out". Find a way to find out about it without looking insinuative or interogative.

maybe you may be a bit scary to some people and so it is possible that they are "nice" to you in order not to elicit your anger.
they may have said "yes" to you so as to keep the peace at the time. maybe they were worried that you may blow a fuse if they rejected your request.

another possibility as to why she is telling you you are "awesome" and a "great guy" is from a patronizing urge to make you feel good. if people seem backward or slow, people often compliment them for the smallest things. like how people say to a mentally handicapped person who sets the table correctly "wow you're awesome johnny".

um..they did not turn up?



oh well "that's life in the big smoke" as they say.
they have a right to do what hey want. maybe they just forgot that they said they would meet you. at least they did not leave you stranded on a street corner by yourself. (actually, maybe they would not have agreed to see you outside the safety of a crowd if they were worried about your state of mind)


well i guess she may have thought you would not take it so insanely seriously that they decided to do something else, and maybe she is surprised that you make such a mountain out of a molehill and therefore does not want to engage you further in conversation if she thinks it will lead to some psychiatric reaction by you.


maybe that is another reason that they are giving you a polite shrugging off. some people can become dangerous when you befriend them for a small while and then try to pull away from them.



there are plenty more fish in the sea.


i would be wary of being caught in a situation where i was alone with you.

everything winds up smelling of roses in the end anyway.

hope that helps to cheer you up.

Work friends are different from regular friends, they flake...alot. It's not that they don't want to be friends it's the fact that it's like going to the office to watch a movie or staying home and watching a movie, it's somewhat out of their comfort zone. All I can really tell you is continue to be nice to this lady and her husband, because holding a grudge and being angry about it just pushes you further away from turning work friends into true friends.

Apparently you've never heard of there being degrees of friendship.

There are close friends. There are less close friends. There are casual friends. And there are people you like on an even more casual level, who are nice to hang around with in a setting like work or school, but that you'd never ask home with you.

Only it's not even that roughly gradated. There is a completely smooth continuum from people you love more than life itself, to people you hate in all contexts. Not everyone has every level of this, but those are the extremes and everything else is between them.

You can also think of it as a series of concentric circles. Each circle farther out is a less intimate relationship. People don't let everyone into the more intimate circles, and this is a means of protecting themselves from being hurt. It is completely up to that person, whether to let you into a more intimate circle than you're in already. It's not up to you.

Frankly, the way you're acting within this thread, I would be cautious about letting you into a more intimate circle than you're at now. (Which is "people I neither like nor dislike", which is where just about everyone starts out by default as far as I'm concerned.) And if you act this way here, you are probably sending out signals there that they take as warning signals. I can't say what signals they are there, but I can say what they are here.

First, you didn't just post a message and then wait for people to reply. You posted, and then you waited an hour and went "can someone answer???" That is the text equivalent of grabbing at people and trying to pull them closer to you. Past that point, you flip out on everyone that tries to explain to you (including those who explain that your behavior here is a signal that they themselves wouldn't want to hang out with you), start calling people names, comparing being blown off by a work friend to the Holocaust, and blowing every single response you get out of proportion. You act like someone who is furious, but then you refer to that as "only a little frustrated" or something like that.

People who are simply frustrated for any reason, do not behave like you are behaving here. You are behaving like a person who is furious and out of control. You are behaving as if you feel entitled to their friendship. People who feel entitled to friendships don't make good friends. Most people have had experiences with people who feel entitled in this way. Such experiences don't end well. Such experiences sometimes end in seriously dangerous behavior. Therefore, people who get even a hint (and it doesn't have to be a large one) that you're going to act this way, will probably do whatever it takes to placate you and then simply avoid getting into those situations. (Others will get pulled in up to a point and then pull out again.)

There is no time period that you can spend around someone that obligates them to do a thing with you, no matter how nice they are to you and no matter what you do for them. Such obligations don't exist.

I have known several people like you. Some are autistic and some aren't. (Most autistic people are not like you in this respect.) Nearly all of them showed obvious danger signs, even when they thought they were not showing such signs. When people did get entangled with them to some degree (which sometimes happened out of guilt or a sense of obligation or fear of how they'd respond to rejection), then things got bad for them. And when they finally left, things got even worse. At minimum they got hostility (even if it's not consciously expressed). At maximum they got rage, violence, stalking, death threats, etc. With someone who acts like you do, people have no guarantee which one they'll get.

To give you an example, I don't always have the best of luck socially. But if someone said they were going to go do something with me, and didn't, I wouldn't even call them an idiot behind their back. And calling them an idiot behind their back is the least of what you are doing. You are taking it out on a large number of people who are sincerely trying to explain this stuff to you. You are unaware of how enraged you sound and insist that it's just getting a little irritated/frustrated/whatever. You are putting people down in cruel ways. And you have so much overblown the significance of what's happening to you that you are comparing it to Jews and the Holocaust. (Yes, disabled people were also killed in the Holocaust, including inevitably many autistic people. We were in fact the test phase for the Holocaust. But there is absolutely no comparison between not wanting to socialize with one particular autistic person (not even if it happens a thousand times over), and getting bussed to a mental institution and gassed in the basement where they then perform experiments on your body. And it's wrong to even draw the comparison, it belittles what people went through.)

To give another example, I have known several people who complained that they had friends who would simply vanish eventually without telling them why (sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly). In all cases where this was a repeated pattern over time, they were sending off danger signals they weren't even aware of. It's possible that that kind of vanishing without explaining why is what this person is doing. It may not seem fair, but that's how the person protects themselves when they're not aware of what you might or might not do in reaction. And people have a right to protect themselves even when it doesn't seem fair. Even when it seems like she shouldn't have said yes if she wasn't coming... well maybe she didn't want to anger you by saying no. I know for an autistic person it can just anger you more by its inconsistency. But it comes from not wanting to get hurt. (And if you push her for an explanation, it's possible that she'd just lie to you. Which is also totally okay in self-protection. I hate lying and I have had to lie to people like this to protect myself before.)

But even though you're giving off danger signals now (and trust me, you were before, even if you didn't think you were, or didn't even know it was possible, because people who react like you're reacting now send them off all the time -- even I can pick up on them most of the time, even though they're barely tangible and even though I'm autistic), it's possible not to. It doesn't come from hiding the signals. It comes from changing your expectations from the world.

In order to do that though, you have to learn, down to the deepest parts of you possible, that:

1. No matter how much you do for someone else, they have no obligation to like you as a friend or to reciprocate socially in any way. They are not cruel or stupid if they fail to do so.

2. There are different layers of friendship. People on one layer can't be expected to move to another layer unless they want to.

3. You are not entitled to be liked by any other particular person, any more than they already like you or seem to like you. That is their choice and their choice alone. (Really internalizing this one, truly, to all levels of your thinking, will seriously tamp down the danger signals you're sending out. Because a lot of the danger stems from this entitlement thing.)

4. People have a right to be wary of you. People who are wary of someone may lie to them in order to protect themselves from that person. This is their right. There is nothing even slightly immoral about it.

5. Happiness is possible even if you never have any friends. Loneliness does not come from lack of friends alone. Genuinely happy people rarely get lonely, and never feel the kind of deep loneliness that can cause a person to feel they have to put someone down or lash out (in any direction, whether outward or inward, and regardless of who it's pointed at, including totally innocent strangers) just because someone didn't want to be friends with them.

6. Nothing you are experiencing is uniquely terrible (and a lot of what you're experiencing isn't even terrible).

I know #5 can sound unbelievable. But it's true. If you do eventually become happy, maybe your path to happiness will involve friends, or maybe it won't. But there are a lot of people out there who look happy because they merely cover up loneliness with "friends" and activities, but who never actually get over it (those with better social skills than us can sometimes hide desperation better than we can). People who are lonely are going to be lonely whether they have friends or not. People who are happy (on a deep level which is different than a transitory emotion) are going to be happy whether they have friends or not.

And I'm not saying all this from some totally weird vantage point removed from any situation you've ever been in, too. I used to be a little like you are myself -- I expressed it somewhat differently, but had similar stuff going on nonetheless. I think autistic people don't always learn not to be that way as early as other people do. And having been that way, I know how much easier it is to react the way you've always reacted, and are reacting here, than it is to change yourself. But changing yourself is the only way this sort of thing will ever change. And eventually people do like you for who you are, once you're not doing things that freak them out too much to be your friend. Of course, writing this, I know you'll probably just flame me like you've flamed everyone else, but at least you'll have the choice of remembering it later.

Hm... lotta cold people around here.

I can understand the feeling of betrayal. And I also don't like people feeding into my meltdowns by telling me how bad I behave and that is why people don't like me. You who replied should know better.

People say a lot of things they don't mean. It can be hard to avoid believing them, because they promise they mean it, prove it even, then just like that they change their minds. Would be nice to get clued in why. It hurts more to have to guess than someone telling you they don't care for you.

I never remember until next time what jerks people can be either.

I noticed the only way I can deal is doing it their way. Being manipulative and lying. Hinting things to make them feel bad. Gives you some power back. It is hard if you're not used to it, if your need and normal style is to be direct and open. But seriously, it's an easy game to learn.

I'm sure all the people who decided they were justified to pour salt in someone's wound are always perfectly zen 100% of the time after they get let down.

I know of a few times that I accidently stood someone up because something came up, but then I felt bad about it and ashamed so I tried to avoid the person. Did not mean I did not like that person...it was just I got eclipsed by events and knew that my appology probably would not suffice although legit. So then I felt too ashamed to approach the person.

So maybe that is what is going on, not her being fake. Perhaps you could scope out the situation and see if I am right.
I dont think clingy is the issue. It is human nature to blame the victim because we dont want to believe that such a thing could happen to us..although I think we can rise above that. As far as your anger, it is not this one event but an accumulative effect that has led to your hostility, but it is a nasty cycle where so much anger builds up then you blow up at ppl, then feel alienated which only fuels your anger and then your rejected again...so on again and again. I suggest finding an outlet for your anger such as journaling, which works wonders by the way. I am not blaming you for what happened, that is not your fault, but only you can control how you react.

I suggest that you casually talk to this lady. Give her the benefit of a doubt and see what she has to say. She probably feels like an idiot and is ashamed to talk with you because of that.


as for the others on this thread. A liitle understanding and alot less blaming the victim is needed here. Sometimes when people are at the limits of their endurance, folks act out their desperation. It is not wise to push them beyond that limit

To the OP:

I think these kinds of posts are hard to respond to. It's tempting for me to make assumptions about what really happened but it doesn't feel right for me to do so when I don't really have enough information to know. I think the best thing to do is to take some kind of action rather than let yourself get into a rut where you ruminate and avoid the person. You should try to find out what really happened from the source rather than let yourself be drawn into endless negative speculations and fears.

Also, I've found that when I post a ranty or emotionally charged topic it's best to wait a while before reading the responses. You're always going to get a few responses you don't like. If you wait a while longer to where there's more responses it's much easier to skim over the ones that might make you feel worse and find better ones further down. Prematurely picking a fight with someone because you don't like their response just leads to a degradation of the overall tone of the thread.

Firstly, injuredmind, knock it off with the insults. People are trying to help you as best they can, just because you don't like what they're saying, or think they don't get it, is no reason to insult them. Frustrated or not, that is no way to converse with someone who is trying to help you out.

Here are some things I notice from your initial post that should be addressed:

Inviting yourself to anything is considered rude. People invite who they want to come, if they haven't invited you then they probably didn't want you there. So, for you to invite yourself and then show up, is much the same as "crashing the party."

Secondly, if they say they're going to someone else's party and then don't, they don't owe you an explanation. It wasn't your party, it was the other guys. If they had told him they were going and then didn't they would apologize to him, and they'd just assume that you'd think they decided not to go and not make a big deal out of it.

If it had been your party, and they said they were going, but then didn't show up, then yes they would owe you an apology or explanation.



People can often tell when someone is pissed off at them. You are obviously very mad at her, even if you try not to act like you are at work, she is still probably picking up a vibe that you're angry. That would explain why she's being "weird" around you.



They probably took it like "hey are you going to that guys party? me too, guess I'll see you there!" Which is a casual thing, like saying "ok see you at work tomorrow." It is a public function with other work people, it is not like you asked them to go see a movie with just you.

You are making too big a deal over something that to them is obviously inconsequential. They aren't trying to hurt your feelings or blow you off necessarily with what they did, they just don't view it in the same way that you do.

You wanted people to respond and address your points, so I have, now you can read and consider what I have said, or you can be childish and insulting, it's up to you. People are not going to be too eager to help you in the future if you keep it up with the insulting routine.

Godwin's law, 'nuff said. And if you use the Holocaust (as opposed to simply Hitler or Nazi Germany) as a way of proving your point, you're a sick individual for doing that. If your co-workers were Jewish and they found out what you posted behind their back, I wouldn't blame them for kicking you out of their lives outright.

Honestly, what is your logic behind your reactions? What's making you upset that they didn't keep their promise to you? I think Anbuend said it pretty well, so I won't repeat myself here. But you need to really think about how you react to what are common social situations, because you're not helping yourself by reacting like this. If aspies who've been in similar situations counterattacked you in this thread, can you imagine how NTs with great social skills would respond to the same thing? Your co-workers didn't keep one promise. Lay off the topic for at least a few months, and just be friendly to them at work.

I'll just say this... as pretty much half NT myself I can see that all NT's don't have great social skills. I have better social skills than some of those considered normal. NT's are different levels too and some are just young and/or immature.