Question for the board....

Post Reply New Topic

Do you have an innate sense of who is your friend versus who is your enemy?

As for myself, I do not.

Discuss please.

I can tell if someone is my enemy if they say something bad about me or they are mean in their reply to me in their PM or in one of their posts. Same as if they accuse me of anything I didn't do.

I tend to think someone is my friend if we are chatting and them seem to take interest in me.

I can tell people are my friends because they talk to me on IM.

I have a good idea, yes.

I trust everyone I have to. It's the only way I survive. This gets me in difficult situations sometimes. If I only trusted people that I actually felt could not be enemies, I would probably trust nobody.

If I take little clues in to consideration when making a judgment on someone being friend or enemy, I usually get it wrong. So, now I change my mind a lot.

Same goes for me.

I trust people too easily, thats why my heart breaks so much.

When it is clear to me that someone is not nice to me and shows no sign of even becoming nicer then yeah they are my enemy.
Friends are a bit harder for me. Are they just people I meet in town that I know or people that I actually go to do things with? I think I'd call both groups of people friends.

No I don't have an innate of who's a friend or foe. Friends are usually much easier to figure out rationally, reciprocal benefits and enlighten self-interest are big clues. Why someone is a foe usually eludes me. The lack of innate social skills is a diagnostic criteria for ASD.

I do not like the term innate.

I used to feel like I could 'read' people, and in many cases I am still pretty good at that I think, but I have been burned a number of times, so I have learned to not make assumptions.

So when it comes to enemies and trust, I do not give away trust easily. Even when I get to know someone pretty well, I would not say I really give them much trust.

Growing up I never considered anyone an enemy (not even bullies, ect...) , and in addition I never really considered anyone a friend (thought I did have a few acquaintances).

Life has taught me the hard way that I cannot tell who is a friend (versus mere acquaintance, or someone who has a love interest in me, or someone who's constantly around me just to use me.)

I also have difficulty reading the emotions of others, and have a bad habit that, when I can't tell what they're feeling, and they're not being overtly nice to me, then I assume they are mad at me or hate me. A significant amount of the time, I'm wrong and they're not mad or whatever they're going through has nothing to do with me at all. So it ends up being not a very fair (pre-judging) self-protective mechanism for me to use.

Enemies are always the hardest to spot. Your worst enemies are the ones who are best at concealing that from you. With my emotion/body language/etc. difficulties taken into account, my enemies basically have the power of invisibility.

I have that issue even though I don't fall for scams or give money to people but I am still too trusting at times. Last month someone pretended to be my friend to get something from me. When I said no, I never heard from him again. He said good things to me and we had the same thoughts and seemed to think alike and I wonder if it was all an act now?

I also keep talking to people when they say they want to be my friend and then getting broken hearted when they stop responding or when I never hear from them again.

I could just ignore newbies now or keep getting my heart broken.

I don't really have anyone that fits into either bucket. But, I'd like to think I would be able to tell the difference.

I tend to class anyone who is nice and talks to me as a friend, especially online acquaintances, since I don't really talk to that many people in real world. However, I know that this is not how everyone classes friends. As a kid, the bullies were usually the ones that teased me or hit me, so they were pretty easy to figure out.

I quickly if not instantaneously classify:

A. Probable Ingroup

B. Probable friend

C. Neutral

D. Probable associate until our goals and methods clash

E. Potentially dangerous with possibility of temporary alliance

F. Poison.

There is another category - people I don't even see unless we are forced into contact. But i can't of course be sure how many there are. Biggest froups are C and D; A quite small and I never knew any till I was in my 30s.