Very Frustrated with So-Called Friendships

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So my challenge now is, how do I get better discernment of choosing which people to trust? Does anyone have any specific, concrete, practical tips on this?

While not a perfect solution, I have found that the way they treat children, wait staff/retail workers and seniors says a lot about a persons true nature. Whenever I see children stick to someone like a magnet (like me!) I know they are usually genuine and trustworthy. It's important to keep a balance between skepticism and open mindedness: too far the other way and nobody will want anything to do with you. Easier said than done but experience has been my best teacher.

It probably doesn't help you much, but I can be trusted with literally anything and never have or never will betray anyone I'm loyal to. I'm sure there are others like me in the world but we don't exactly have banners over our heads.

Aside from me being of the more agnostic/less religious variety, you are right on the money about how we tend to attract predatory people with character and personality disorders who want to take advantage of our traits.

And how I think that we combat this is through some kind of support system of some kind, especially other loving caring people who look out for us from time to time. Bf has grown accustomed to looking out for me, and I ask him what he thinks about things from time to time to get another perspective on whether or not I seem to be intuiting things about other people correctly. Of course, not everyone is always afforded that option of a second opinion in life, but I'll take it since I have it.

I have learned though, that people can't keep their true intentions hidden forever though. And a lot of us have really good memory so we oftentimes are good at catching people in their lies. For all I know, my ex-friend probably even lied about being aspie. She was no stranger to telling lies anyway depending on who she was around. As for my real aspie male best friend, he thinks that his ex-friend probably has narcissistic personality disorder.

I just wish, that my two real friends (people who know me for me, curiously both aspie males actually) lived closer. And not Arizona! and New York! when I live in Missouri.

Thing is, they do say it, loud and clear - at least that's how they perceive it. 'Reading between the lines' doesn't just come easy to NTs, it happens before they're even aware of it. For them, a large part of being 'friend's is paying attention to each other, thereby fostering the ability to read each other's non-verbal communication. So when an NT is non-verbally communicating something, but you're not picking it up, they assume it's because you don't actually care to pay attention. That's it. Not because they want to be an ass, not because they have no morals, it's just that you're sending out non-verbal messages yourself that's being translated as "yeah, not interested." Even if you have a long conversation with that person explaining your position, your diagnosis, your difficulties, it takes an incredible amount of effort for them to try and understand that position and modify their behaviour accordingly. It's probably as difficult for a NT to think like an Aspie as it is for an Aspie to think like a NT.

So why not just verbalise their feelings? 2 reasons. Mainly because the vast majority of non-verbal communication given off by NTs (or anyone) is done subconsciously, without the need for it to move to higher centres of thought to be delivered verbally. So a lot of NTs don't even know why a friendship with an Aspie is falling apart. They're doing all the things that experience and their neurological 'wiring' has taught them, but it's not working so they walk away. Sometimes they get nasty. I'm not condoning, I'm not even justifying, I'm just laying out what I've found.

nikt, your analysis is awesome. It really helped me a lot. It helps me not to take it so hard, that these people have distanced from me. I guess my theory of mind issues make it hard for me to realize that other people really do think a lot differently than I do.

musicforanna, I live in Missouri too! You are lucky to have 2 close friends. I don't have any close friendships with other women ATM, but am grateful I have my husband and two boys. I may have to talk my husband into attending my open 12 step meeting with me. He has a better sense of discernment that way. I've often thought how helpful it would be, if he met and got to know and spent time with some of these people that I end up becoming acquainted with.

All of my life. I have one friend whom I have known for 40 years, but for the most part we don't see each other very often. But we can get on the phone and chat like we didn't have a huge gap between chats. He is most definitely NT.

I have another friend whom I used to work with, but we maintained a friendship after parting to different companies (and types of jobs). We don't see each other as much since he got married, but once in a while we will hang out together. He has definite aspie tendencies.

Other than that, the only person to stick around and seem to actually like hanging out with me is my sister (2 years younger than me).

I had gotten married in 2007, but things went downhill pretty quickly. My ex was NT and did a very subtle form of verbal abuse which I didn't tolerate well (hospitalized 4 times due to MI issues). So I am very leery of relationships at this point.

I never really thought about it before, but most of my BFs (and my ex hubby) were definitely a bit predatory and took advantage of my low self esteem. They all had serious character deficits which is why most of my relationships died before they hit 3 months. My marriage didn't officially end until 4 years, but it had major issues long before then. Pretty much from the start if you ask my sister. I had major abdominal surgery a month after we were married, and my hubby of the time barely visited me in the hospital. Never a good sign. I think he was the desperate one to have a relationship more so than I was as he hadn't been single very long before asking me out. And he managed to have a new GF even before the divorce was finalized.

Most of my life I have muttered that people suck, and rarely do I meet someone that makes me want to change my mind. Not even at the spiritual center I attended. At first I thought they were a higher class citizen, but the longer I was there and the more I watched from the sidelines, the more I realized that it was friggin high school all over again.

I know you guys mean good but seriously it's been the same throughout my life and it's so frustrating!! It's not like i never tried to understand them..i would even try to rationalize when something felt wrong with my lack of abilities to see the broader picture it was me who always took tje initiative..if it was me who was upset i had to get better on my own and had put on a happy face before they completely moved away from me while if they were upset i had to listen to them console them...where are the points that i completely missed???!?
No it's more like that in people like us they find a toy to use whenenever theylike...i can not keep putting myself out there to get hurt again and again till i find a good friend!!

What part of Missouri are you in? I'm in Kansas City.

You know the funny thing? I found these two from the same chatroom about 10 years ago. Had no idea when I met them that they were aspie but we always had a bond that no one else seemed to get with me and we all found out later that we all were diagnosed. It seemed like that chatroom (the then glorious "Macintosh:1") had a lot of aspie qualities to the people who frequented in there. Unfortunately, that chatroom is no longer (seems that way when yahoo upchucked java chatting---unless you consider horny foreign bots on yahoo messenger to constitute as "existing"-- everyone gave up on it after that though).

I think the only friendships I have with women at the moment are women from a private scrapboard. But, it ties into my friendship with one of the male aspie friends-- the board is mostly admin'ed and moderated by his wife. And she's quite tolerant of me to know some about how I am based upon how he is, and the board basically exists because of dissatisfaction of another common scrapboard being severely judgmental so they spun their own, made it private, and called it home. So the culture of the board is already a very tolerant one and I think that is good for me.

I don't really get out as much as I used to to make a lot of friends who are local. I might want to do something about that, but I still feel somewhat burned from my ex-friend-- I think that holds me back.

I don't know if it's possible to know the level of reliability of a person that you like when you just met each other. I try to meet people similar to me and see what happens.

But I avoid friends that kiss and hug too much. I know I can be unfair but I think you don't need to demonstrate you are a good friend only by kissings and hugs and beautiful words. I had a friend that sometimes was "all hands" and then I discovered it was all hypocrisy. He was gossiping about me with other people.

I don't like cheesy people. All of them seem very naïve but the reality is that some of these naïve mates are not that naïve, they are, in fact, wicked.

^This

Yes I've had many people that have flaked out on my friendship, but mostly right at the beginning, before it even formed. I think I do ok once people actually ''get to know me'' but yeah finding new friends and forming lasting bonds is definitely a real challenge for me. People just seem to blow me off from the get go.

I had a very similiar experience to this! I met a girl in a group therapy I was doing (a mindfullness course). It turns out we were about the same age, had somewhat similar interests, and she lived just a few blocks from me~ All my life I'd longed for that storybook friendship where you could just go over to your friends house and vise versa and just 'hang out' (I grew up in the country so even for the *very* few friends I had young this was not an option).

Anyway she just turned out to be a selfish, mean, inconsiderate b***h! I remember one time another friend of mine invited me out to her birthday. I agreed to go and invited my new friend along. She always wanted to ''go out'' (Ie go drinking/bars/dancing etc) but I never did, so I felt by inviting her I could kill two social birds with one stone...see my other friend (I am notorious for declining invites due to social anxiety) and also appease my new friend. Well she got really excited about it but unfortunately on the night I had horrible tonsilitus and was quite ill. Because I knew she really wanted to go I said I would go but only for a couple of hours.

So we went, and well I was my usual anxious awkward self and she was talking to boys or something (I dont remember much to be honest). After a couple of hours I wanted to leave becasue I didn't want to pay for a taxi and it was the last train, and also I felt I"d fulfilled my ''only a couple of hours'' obligation.
Well she REALLY didn't want to leave (some boy was hitting on her) and she begged me to stay. She said she would pay for a taxi for us both to get home. So I agreed.

A few hours later the place was FINALLY closing (like 4am) and by this time I'm feeling *really* ill with fever and tonsilitus, and she comes up to me and wants me to accompany her to this random dudes house that she'd met. He lived on the opposite side of the city to us, and I really didn't want to go since there was talk of more drinking and smoking weed, and either way I didn't want to get stuck out on the other side of the city with no way to get home (bar $100 cab fare). So I stood my ground and refused (usually just give in to peer pressure).

Well she was so pissed off ~ she didn't really say, but she saw made it obvious that she was annoyed at me. I didn't get why because I was the one that invited her out in the first place, and then I stayed an extra 3-4 hours even tho I didn't want to, and now she's mad like I ruined her night! And then she said she had no money for a cab! So rude!

I ignored her for a bit after that but then we just got back to normal, but I started to realise she was always just directing the friendship, saying what we should do and when and if I wasn't keen on it it didn't matter.
The final straw was when she im'd me one day and asked how I was, I had been having some bf issues so I said something about that, and from memory I was also studying at the time. Well literally 2 minutes later when I returned to the IM window to ask how she was she'd signed off. And I think I might have texted or emailed her asking what up and she sent me this scathing email about how I was so selfish and rude becasue I hadn't asked how she was, and I think I"m the only one having a bad day. Well the way I see it she didn't even give me the opportunity to ask how she was because she signed off so quickly. And I did check through our old communications just in case, and I definitely did ask about her, and all that, in fact most of our conversations revolved around her!

Anyway after that we weren't really friends anymore. But I always regret that I lent her some books that I never got back lol

This was always the dynamic in all my friendships and acquaintances, all my life. I spent several decades racking my brain as to what it is I do later on that I didn't do at the beginning - why is it always later on that they find out they dislike me so much it's ok to behave like a jerk to me by gradually ignoring me more and more and disappearing without a word of explanation? I'm not anywhere near discovering the reason than I was at the beginning of the search. Therapists that treated me for years are stumped as well. And as mentioned above, there's no way to get a true answer from the dumpers.

I don't believe the problem lies in our skill at choosing the friends. If anything, we're often not the ones doing the choosing. And since everyone does this to me, it's improbable that I was so unskilled as to choose wrong every single time along my life. Moreover, the same dumpers DO NOT do this to others, at least not often.

I don't give friendship a chance anymore, i don't have the strength for all that pain anymore. Also, to avoid making enemies, I have to avoid making friends with them to start with.

By the way, this is the very reason I don't lend books or CDs. I know the person will vanish before I get them back.

I'm either dumped by gradual self-effacing, or used and abused till I say no more, then called selfish.

In the latter scenario, there's an escalation that starts with total respect for me, then degenerates and degenerates until they're just an abuser. And they don't do this to other people.

I think people misinterpret my total loyalty for willingness to take any kind of abuse and exploitation without ever leaving. There's some boundaries signal that I fail to give nonverbally and that everyone else gives. I know because when I finally leave the person, they're in total shock, can't believe I actually had it in me to say no more and continue life without them.

Lately I'm constantly asking myself if I have any TRUE friends. Some "friends" of mine, who are actually cousins, have been really upsetting me lately. One "friend" and I have been close for a long time, but recently I have backed off. I have twin daughters who are 8 years old, and she has a soon to be 3 years old. She, and her family, have always reprimanded my girls whenever they misbehave, but lately it's gotten worse, and she doesn't think that I should even LOOK at her son the wrong way. Her "precious" son will chase my girls and bite them, or hit them constantly, while my "friend" tells them that it's their fault because they run from him and he's just wanting to play! I, naturally, try to avoid any confrontations, but finally at one point decided it's not worth it. She, and also her family, belittle me, act as if my opinions are rubbish, and all their ideas are more important. I just feel heartbroken,and foolish, have I been blind this whole time? Did adding children to the equation help me see their true colors?
I have no friends other than family (husband,daughters,parents,siblings) and still feel different than even these. My family has no problem making friends, they all are outgoing, funny, and friendly. I am an outsider in my own life,always I remember one birthday party from childhood, where I stared out the window and watched everyone else outside enjoying themselves at MY birthday party, wishing I could be like them. I still feel like this. I have not been diagnosed with anything, but took a test online saying I'm very likely an Aspie? Well, it would explain a lot. I'm so glad I found this web site! I feel like I belong somewhere, finally.