Dramatic Endings

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I have had a longstanding issue of loosing female friendships, especially "best" friends with whom I get emotionally close. I wonder if any other aspie women have this problem befriending other women?
I don't know all the reasons why my relationships with other females has nearly always ended with as much drama and crying as the men I've lost, or needed to kick out of my life. It is my asperger-ness that makes me the way I am, yet I don't want to tell everyone that in any attempt to salvage relationships I realize I don't need. I have actually found most of the relationships I had were more than I wanted to keep up with. That I had obligitory relationships and I have cut them right and left since I figured out about my own aspieness when discovering it for two of our four children a few yrs ago. I am the one who dropped most of the social clutter in my life, including extranious relationships that really didn't pertain to my life goals or personal comfort for that matter. I am okay with cutting people from my life, them cutting me. It is happening more and more the more I let and coax the real me out of hiding. I feel like she crept into a tiny ball and hid somewhere deep down inside my social good behavior and socail norms I tried so hard to follow and "enrich" my children with. I loved people, I even loved some of the things I was doing with work, voulenteer, ect, but it was all just too much and now my life is in a very still and isolated place. (good thing)

I have just managed to loose the last two of my "friends" and these two I don't even know IRL, they were internet friends that I had become close with over a long time. One of them was actually ten years running. This is due to me being more and more my true self mostly in the past year. My friend of ten years said in her last message to me that the last year she doesn't know me and misses the me she met ten years ago. Well, ten years ago I was riddled with all kinds of issues stuffing my round self into a square hole of life so to speak. I behaved as expected and kept feelings I knew no one else would understand to myself. Well, I am glad to have rid of these relationships. I don't really welcome any thoughts or rekindling any of them. I just wonder if I am the only aspie woman who has really deep friendships with other women end as tradgicly and painfully as male breakups? It has been happening my whole life, childhood, teen years a lot, then my adulthood is peppered with them as well. I am very kind and loving. I am very passionate, devoted and trustworthy. I am loyal and yet I do not get the same in return usually because I don't want to return a phone call or attend some social function that I find to be a rude demand of mine and my families time.

I am married and enjoy the friendship of my husband who is learning about aspergers in me and in our children. Seeing our little aspie daughter really gives us both insight as to how I was growing up with sensory issues and all. I know there has to be friendships out there even for odd balls like me.

Am I the only one who has these issues?

I have had very few close friendships with females, but among the few I have had , I had some end somewhat dramatically. The one time I had a female best friend...in High School, we had a dramatic falling out because I joined a band and that pretty much meant falling in with the wrong crowd...I behaved in a way that was insensitive and wreckless and ruined the friendship forever.

A friendship I had in my late 20's with a female ended over something really trivial, but now, years later, whenever we see each other in public, we each act like the other doesn't exist. It was over an issue of candles. She had an art opening and spent money on candles and demanded that we reimburse her for the candles, and we refused..as it had not been discussed in advance..it was her choice to buy the candles for her art opening...end of friendship...

I don't know how to be friends with girls...I just don't...for the most part...I have gotten emotional over acquiring friendships with females...just because it is something I have sometimes felt the lack of...but quickly enough, my awkwardness shines through and I prove myself to be not worth the trouble of anything beyond a friendly-to-neutral acquaintance.

I find it hard to tell exactly what I do wrong...

Once I made friends with a girl who was on the "mentally ill" side...and we started out with a really nice and congenial friendship..we seemed to have a lot in common...she was bi-polar and had some other issues...and there seemed to be something compatible about our personalities and we could easily talk about stuff...and then she flipped out on me and i couldn't be her friend after that..I won't go into the details......Shortly thereafter, her dad sent her to live in South America (where she was from)

In my early 20's I was friends with a girl who was in a wheel chair...For a while we got along really well...but it seemed she overcompensated for her wheelchairness by sorta being a compulsive liar...and she betrayed my trust, as I had confided some stuff to her and she went and told some people, and it was really embarrassing...
Early on in the friendship, she's lamented on how she always starts out in these friendships and then and out of the blue, something would happen and these people were not her friends anymore....I figured out what it was...

I'm glad you replied. I've been reading some things you've written and watched one of your You Tube songs and seems I relate to you though our lifestyles vary right now. I lived a lot like you in a "former life" Before the husband and kids came along. Anyways, your descriptions sound very familiar. The gossip, which I hate, the finding of friends in others who are slightly different, all sounds familiar. The ending is the most familiar and I am getting tired of putting fourth the energy. I have two female friends who have also given me the boot the last few weeks IRL. One person I finally told what I really think IS my best friend from high school! That was a long time ago, but we keep in touch via email and have seen one another a few times over the years. I told her how I really feel, that I am going through stuff and don't want to talk/ visit. She wants to demand to know, but she isn't even in my current life! UGH! If it would help me to talk about it I might, but not with her anyways! Another betrayer of embarrassing information. The other young woman was helped and "mentored" in many a way, espeically spiritually by me for a number of years and I feel it is time for her to move on. We don't see eye to eye on some very core stuff of life. To be fair, she doesn't really know this, but if I told her what I really think and feel it'd be over anyways. ~Sigh~

I'll not conclude I'm better off alone though. That isn't healthy nor a good role model for the children. I'll have to figure it out somehow, but the friendships may have to stay somewhat shallow (my dreaded un-favorite) because no one can seem to handle me, my depth, my intensity, my honesty. So I guess I'll just have to figure out walking a tight rope for the times it is necessary... bummer.

I don't think this is especially an Asperger's thing. It's a standard part of the deal in this country for female relationships to end in drama. It looks different from a spectrumite POV because we don't get swept up in it as a total lifestyle the way others do.

thanks, cowbird for your input. You say it isn't an aspie issue but I see many other ladies with close personal friends in whom they can tell the real truth and not just social b.s.

me, I had been terribly swept away in it for years. Looking for the sister I never had. Looking for what everyone else seemed to have, someone who has been there through it all. A best friend. Every time though, almost every time I guess, it has some big falling out that I don't even understand many times.

I didn't know I was different and used to be very social, no one would have guessed the aspie in me years ago even post 94 text referrence being available. In that time, my perserveration WAS social junk.

Now to carve out a "new normal" for my life yet again. Ho hum, really jazzed about this challenge. NOT.

I think that for anyone, but especially for an aspie, the concept of a "best" friend has to include the ability to piss each other off without things ending.
I mean, if a friendship can end over candles.. how close a friendship could it have been?
For me, it also includes being able to be out of contact for a long time without things changing. It's stability that makes a "best" friend, not just intensity. I don't think someone can possibly be your best friend if you can't totally disagree with them and still love each other.

I agree with everything you say, MaggieDoll, I don't have an opinion on the candles though. My issues have been far more complex, and I'd settle for good friends, my best friend is my husband. I agree it should include long stretches of busy life and little to no contact, I have four children I home school for crying out loud! I am busy! Also, I do need the maturity of someone willing to allow me my own beliefs and thoughts without judgement. Rough find.

I really do think it is based on social "norms" and unspoken expectations. I just can't do those things. They rack my brains out. I don't find they make any sense. I also feel I am expected to be a mindreader. I understand how men talk about women that way, and see their point. I have had the same issues with women friends not telling me what they really mean, want, need, but expect me to know! I am frustrated with the whole thing.

Yeah..the candles thing was weird...She wasn't my best friend, but she was my only female friend at the time. She had helped me get a job at the place where she worked during the first time that Flakey and I had broken up. I had met her through a *mutual friend (who had called her her best friend)...with whom she'd had an eventual falling out where they no longer spoke to each other...We were reacquainted because she was dating somebody I knew. We would run around and go thrift shopping and go out to eat and go to her house and stuff. She was really eccentric...my main function as her friend was to listen to her sound off...often about various other mutual female acquaintances who she disliked or had done her wrong...It was my job to listen and not defend or contradict....and so on...After the candles incident, I guess I wound up on that list.
I guess I don't handle conflict well.

As I said, I am usually not worth the trouble for most females who seem interesting enough for me to want to attempt friendship...or there is something about me that has often managed to somehow offend them and I don't know what it is...because I can't tell what they are thinking..they are a mystery....Or they will have a personality that is too overwhelming for me to bear due to mandatory requirements of hugs and smalltalk, so I have to set up a defensive barrier around myself..which can be offensive to them...

Then, I have trust issues....I have had females pretend to be my friends because they had ulterior motives too many times.

yada yada yada...

It is tiresome...

Outside the small group of spectrumy males who I am comfortable with, i tend to alienate pretty much everybody...
The closest thing I have to a female friend is my male AS-ish partner with gender identity issues...and though he can be snappy and bitchy(in a similar way that I can occasionally be)...the dynamics are different than they would be with a real female... and I am a lot more clear on how his mind works because he always speaks his mind.
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*(see above asterisk) mutual female friend who I occasionally would try to work on music with...but we had repeated fall outs due to conflicts of minds..my ability to offend unintentionally...my inability to know what the other was thinking or what they wanted...and she was sorta picky and judgmental...she moved away, but we are still acquaintances.