simple isn't easy - but does it have to be this hard?

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For all the NT social situations I've learned to navigate, I haven't figured out how to arrange the kind of social situation I enjoy. I've met NTs who say they enjoy this sort of thing, so I don't think I'm trying to manipulate anyone into anything horrible for them. Because it seems like it should be something really easy and relaxed, I hate myself for feeling so completely baffled at how to go about getting there.

No, I'm not talking whips and chains. Just spaghetti & a documentary. Two people, a quiet evening, simple inexpensive quality food, and a documentary film that interests both. That would be ideal social interaction for me, and it seems like it should be simple enough to fulfill, but in reality I'm beginning to feel I'd have a better chance at learning ballet and being able to dance in Swan Lake by next winter.


Part of the challenge is where I'm living right now. The spaghetti & documentary thing was pretty standard where I used to live, though most old acquaintances back there are now all about spaghettios and videos of a purple dinosaur.

There's a guy who's here for the summer (well just a few more weeks now) who lived for a while in the same place where spaghetti & a documentary was OK socially, and I think he'd be up for it. But I have NO idea how to suggest it. I told him last night that I have AS; the number of references on my Facebook profile meant he'd had a frame of reference for a few things he'd noticed. So I'm guessing I could just put it at the meta level and ask him the same way I've asked this here. He's NT but super intelligent and was geeky until his mid-20s.

As we parted ways yesterday I said maybe we could go jogging sometime. That's the kind of thing I generally put out there, and then if the other person doesn't pick it up and run with it, I just don't pursue. Which I suppose is too passive; I used to be super heavy-handed about things, and I have no idea how to find the middle.

There are also these head games I play with myself, where I go round and round sure I've done something wrong. That definitely reduces my confidence in my own judgment, which then makes it more likely I screw up. Grrr! Today I wanted to go jogging alone, but for some reason in a reply to his e-mail about something else, I referenced jogging ("sounds like you won't be going jogging tonight then"), and felt rebuffed when he said he'd already been. I'd been planning to go on my own anyway and going together would have been more contact than I could handle. Gosh, I really hate it when I second-guess myself into being convinced I was out of line AND got rejected. WTF? I end up feeling all pathetic-needy about things where I'm strong and happy.


So ... are there people w/ whom you can spend a quiet evening, if you're into that? And how does that happen? I find that at best it generally works once w/ NTs, then they want to go do "exciting" things. Ack!

I've never heard of 'S & D' before, but it sounds close to social heaven to me! To me the difficulty would be finding anyone who is also interested in a documentary. The only TV I really like is comedy and documentary - anything from how the Vikings sailed to Egytian religion via the structure of DNA will get be totally hooked. But I just never meet anybody else similar, with them it's violent action films (yukk), scrape the barrel social soft porn drama (double yukk) or (falsely so called) reality TV (treble yukk).



Yes, it sounds like that's what you're doing. At least you've realised! From what you say in your post, your social abilities are way ahead of mine, maybe even the typical Aspie. I don't think you're doing anything wrong, apart from fretting about doing something wrong.



I would love to think so. I guess I've forgotten/left behind that once, a long time ago, I did have a circle of friends and this is what we did. However, my experience was that the NT's 'grew up', well, 'grew apart' and drifted off into serious relationships, careers and family making. I eventually did that to, but have never changed from enjoying an interesting documentary followed by a pseudo-intellectual debate (aided by booze or whatever). It just seems that the chances of finding anyone similar are non-existant.

As to the NT's and their 'exciting' things, it's all down to the subjective definition of 'exciting'. I think that because NTs are less sensory overloaded, they need much louder, grosser, less subtle stimulation to register anything, than Aspies. And the more they get, the less sensitive they get.

Ah, thanks so much for the validation. Yeah, I'm an S&D fetishist.




Well, I've worked =really= hard on that. In some areas I feel like the work I've done has even put me ahead of most NTs, but that doesn't help me overall.





I've known NTs who intentionally, mindfully keep sensory stimulation at a minimum, and watch TV only for things like documentaries. None live near me right now though.


After years of working on my skills for minimising negative impact on others, I'm finally trying to look at =my= social needs, accepting my needs as valid (I don't believe that Aspies "don't need people" - we just give up b/c what's easy to find sure as heck isn't what we need)
and wondering how on earth to meet them. Like you said, the right match.

I've thought of posting a social-personal ad in the activity partner section. In the past I've done this for sports and for language exchange, but it felt like most of the respondents were looking for instant best-buds.

What kind of Documentaries do you like?

Transcendence,

The only person I can spend a quiet evening with alone is myself. I can't even count on family members because my family is a bunch of loud and boisterous talkers. Even the "quiet" ones like to talk constantly, just in a more controlled tone. If someone can find out how to make that happen I would be interested in knowing as well.

Arbie, sorry to hear about your family. Sounds very familiar.

Do you think there's a way we could logically figure out how to arrange quiet D&S evenings? We could list what we've already tried, and what else could work.

I agree absolutely 100%! ! The NT world has evolved to meet *their* needs. Nothing wrong that, but we should explore ways of meeting *our* needs too, as well as fitting in. As you said, some NT's like a quieter time, too.

I am theoretically NT and do S&D. I'm not very social and am uncomfortable in groups of more than around six, and they've really all got to be familiar to me.

I think you're missing part of the ritual. This unpleasant business of going out and doing exciting things is something I would prefer to do without, but has its value in that the larger the party, the less offense I give when I suddenly leave. The exciting activity is no doubt meant to keep everybody from leaving, and often calculated to keep boring people like myself away. It does serve, like numbers of people, to provide social cover in the form of other people's inattention.

You will probably have more success getting your S&D invitations accepted again if you arrange the parties to contain more quiet people than just yourself and one other. I would feel (no doubt wrongly, but by force of habit) enormous social pressure at your one-on-one S&D event: me, out there responsible for creating a full half of a pleasant evening. Once I got used to you this would not matter and the two-person party would be fine given that I liked you much.

I have often chosen to socialize with married couples who get along very smoothly with one another. Comfortable with each other, they get comfortable with me faster stop having to do the active socialization stuff that feels like the exploratory jabbing that it is.

It is possible to replace the doing exciting things part with doing structured things. I made quiet-evening friends in University that way, but never at work. You can join clubs and do the club stuff. Some of them are really awful, like the SCA, but if I go to the Beekeeper's Association meeting nobody will really want to talk about anything but bees, so I'll be all tense but I won't have to do the small-talk test, I'll talk about bees. Audubon Societies are a mixed bag, but if you go on the field trips you can usually find the sub-group that only talks to call out what bird they've just identified. Some of them are likely to be raging egos who think they are playing a deadly serious bird identification skills ranking game, but I've found some good for a quiet evening.

You've sure got the pedantic part of AS down, though. Couldn't really follow your writing style very well.

In and after college I knew plenty of NTs who did S&D.





"their" needs ... I guess it's an efficient system, when most people have similar needs. Where I went to college and worked for a while in the U.S., it was a super diverse environment, so I guess people there generally had better skills at working with differences. Where I'm living now, the culture is pretty streamlined, very few natives question the way things work.




Thank you for that affirmation. It's something I've been neglecting for the past ten years or, well, forever. The past few years I've dramatically decreased the drains of meeting others' needs and adapting to their preferences, but learning to dare to think about how to get mine met? aaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Where's the screaming smiley?






I've got an S&D "date" for tomorrow evening. We haven't settled on the D part yet, but we'll see. My guess is that his need to talk is going to make it less than optimal, but it's practice.

Eh. Sorry.

1) S&D and other low-intensity passiveish activities (like just sitting there in the same room reading) are 'intimate' (but not necessarily sexual) to most people.

2) You have to build the friendship some first, because (unless your friend is actually kinda keen for it to become sexual) s/he will be crawling with anxiety if the situation feels 'intimate' before s/he's used to you/thinks the two of you are 'close.'

(a) More people = less 'intimate' (enormous difference between 2 and 3)
(b) more active/structured = less 'intimate' (reading quietly > gardening quietly, for example)

Dealing with people in college classes tends to cover (a) and (b) a bit before you even think about wanting to do S&D, so it works out without you needing to arrange the steps.

@ Electric_Kite, not picking up ~any~ NT vibes at all in your writing style (and presumption you've got the complete overview) but, whatever.

College & post-college, there was quite a lot of non-sexual s&d action with near-strangers. Maybe that worked b/c the quirk factor was much higher there than elsewhere.

Also, 'building the friendship' hasn't worked at all as a foundation for s&d - people who can't handle it don't develop the ability.

Me too. Pasta & nonfiction sound highly appealing as a shared activity, to my temperament.

I read this (your) thread a while ago, then read another one (by someone else) and I responded to that one at length-themes seemed similar (despite one thread being in "friendship & social skills" & other being under "love & dating" section) to me. Link:
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt75493.html
Pardon my cross-posting, it's too mentally exhausting to repeat myself anew with original reply-when I've covered most of it in this post:

Re: online dating:
Re: offline dating:

Well, sure. I'm obsessive and twitchy and talk funny and cannot abide to be touched and all that. I really doubt some expert, even if I should visit one, will tell me I have Asperger's Syndrome, or deny that I have lots of traits of it.



It's all about the quirk factor. Actually, my small yet statisfying social life is populated entirely with more-or-less stable mental-health cases and people who love 'Dungeons and Dragons.' I don't bother ever trying to introduce the unweird to my social-life, they seldom interest me and I know they don't want to hang with me anyway.



Well, this summer a guy I've known for years who always had to be D&D gaming or going out to the movies (or asking me to do something exciting that I'd refuse) suddenly developed the ability to just sit there watching baby toads hop out of the puddle in the bottom of the disused swimming pool by my house, or wander vaguely through the woods picking up feathers and figuring out what bird they used to belong to, etc. That was unexpected.

I'm sure people don't develop the ability, I'm on about getting those who already have it to feel that doing S&D with you is okay. Outside of college, where the bohemian atmosphere encourages communing with non-fiction and the king of poverty-line foods.

I've missed your point entirely?

Sharing the same interests is no guarantee of further company.

Once I (sort of) dated a girl whom I had met at a poetry recital. We ate puddings, walked a while in the night, and talked. How did it turn out? Well, nothing she said was of any interest to me, and vice versa. Even with my dulled social senses I could perceive that we were boring each other to death.

The other day I went out dining with someone I especially admire. For months I had looked forward to us having a private moment to get to know each other. It wasn't bad, but I could quickly notice there would not be a second time. We talked, we walked, we watched the lights of the city. But then, we said good night and parted. End of story.