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AnAlias
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Joined: 9 Jul 2008
Age: 40
Gender: Male
Posts: 626
Location: The east coast (north side)

09 May 2009, 2:25 pm

I have difficulty thinking of other people as separate individuals. By this I mean that I like to think of other people more in terms of the broad categories of what sort of personality they have, what types of things they do, rather than on the specific details of their own particular life. This seems to be an issue being friends with NTs, because NTs expect if you are friends with them, then you will track the details of their own individual life, and discuss it with them. I don't really feel comfortable doing this a lot of the time. It goes both ways though. With most people I don't really feel comfortable discussing the details of my life either. I would rather just be thought of as a broad category, interchangeable with other similar people, and manage the details of my life myself. I get rather uncomfortable when people treat me as an individual, someone with feelings they need to personally address, it makes me think, if only on a subconscious level, that they think I'm weak and needing of extra attention. So I get uncomfortable when people who I barely know, have met a few times before and don't really consider an especially close friend, come up and start asking me questions about details of my life, even if those are details that I have shared with them in the past, it makes me uncomfortable that I remember. Similarly, if I see someone I have met before, even if I remember some details of their life they have told me about in the past, I feel uncomfortable asking about them, largely because I know how uncomfortable it would make me, or because maybe those details are no longer relevant to their life, or maybe they will think I want to be more of a friend than I really do, or they will expect me to remember more details than I do. I find it simpler just to ask them how they are doing and get a general update. This seems like something that should just be renewed on each contact anyway, rather than having to remember the details of the personal lives of a hundred different casual acquaintances. This seems to be the opposite of the way NTs view things though. If you want to have any sort of friendly discourse with them at all, they expect you to think of them as individuals, remembering the details of their personal lives, and asking them about as much as you can remember every time you meet them. If you don't do this, they soon want nothing at all to do with you. They think you are weird and avoid you as much as possible. This seems wrong to me. I can understand to a certain extent, not considering someone a friend unless they show some interest in you personally, but I am very selective with my friends, and I don't think the attitude should just be "f**k you" to everyone else. Things like love and kindness are not things that should be restricted to a particular class of people you have designated as "friends," and you should be able to have fun and discourse with someone without having to get into a whole lot of details of their personal lives. What does everyone else think of this?


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