How socially adept (or inept) are your friends?

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They say that people are often drawn to those that are similar to them, which got me wondering how people here compare to their friends. I would say out of my three closest friends, two of them struggle and the other copes a lot better than us.

My two friends of mine struggle in different ways. One of them has a hard time with eye contact, and gets shy around new people (Let's call them H).

The other doesn't seem to pick up on signals that people don't want to talk about a particular subject, or why what he said was rude.

Sometimes he uses the wrong tone, mannerism, or turn of phrase, so people think he's being mean/ condescending, when actually he's trying to be nice. (Let's call them B)

Our friend who tends to do better socially than us (Y), complains that she is socially awkward, but I don't believe that's true.

She's better at remaining on track in conversations, and doesn't go off on random tangents unlike B and I.

Yeah, it is fortunate that we are all friends with each other really, B often helps me and I help B. They let me know if I'm missing sarcasm, and I let them know if what they said was rude or if the other person simply isn't interested/ they are bombarding them with too many questions.

Interestingly, B, Y and I all took the RAADS-R test and Y predicted that she would score the highest, but she actually scored the lowest out of us, whereas I scored the highest. Y was the only one who got in the NT range on that quiz. I do not know what H would score.

I have a professor friend who seems rather "Aspie" to me.

If prodded, he can go on and on about certain things of a political nature.

But he has to be prodded.

There are times when his "sense of justice" interferes with his accomplishing his goals. For example, he refused, on principle, to pay a certain fee to present a paper within a symposium. This symposium could have been his "going out party" (i.e., he could have become more "known" as a result of him speaking there).

One of my friends has Asperger’s, another is close enough to the spectrum to have been tested but deemed not on it, and the third hasn’t been tested but shows some definite signs. So I get along with the less socially able far more than those who are good at it.

There definitely seems to be some sort of "clustering" amongst my circle of friends. When I started telling people about my diagnosis (only happened two years ago), I discovered that two friends are also diagnosed with ASD. But oddly enough, they are not the friends who seem most similar to me in terms of socialising. Among the smaller group who I see most often, two others without diagnosis also seem to have notable ASD traits. Both have very apparent problems with not being able to get to the point in conversation, going off on extended tangents and missing attempts to point out that they are doing this.

It's striking that when I'm speaking about my own autistic traits and the troubles they give me, I never need to go into lengthy explanations with them, as they both seem to intuitively understand what I'm talking about - we can have lengthy conversations about how confusing we find other people's behaviour and how often we feel that we are being misunderstood by the other people around us. I do find I have much in common with my two formally diagnosed friends, but they actually seem to have less severe social problems and more "normal" careers and romantic lives than the two who are not. (Note, I deliberately say "seem to have" as I'm well aware of the power of "passing" to be deceptive.)

I have a friend with Fragile-X, and so she is socially challenged, but only mildly affected like myself. But even though we are both only mildly affected social-wise, we still both have the same struggles when it comes to employment.

I have another friend who may be on the spectrum but I can't tell for sure. She does have trouble socialising and takes things very literally, and needs support in certain areas of life like understanding money. She hung out with people with disabilities when she was at college, particularly people with autism. She has said she finds NT people confusing.

Another friend of mine is a couple of decades older than me, and she is rather eccentric but I think she is NT though. I think she's a hillbilly-type of person, because she always lived out in the country and never cared for modern trends. She was brought up on a farm and had a lot of companion with animals, and only played with other children when in school.

My friends are very unlike me. They're all a bit odd in a way or another, but all are very extroverted and does very well socially. The way I get friends is basically by some outgoing person approaching me and dragging me along.
I have one friend now that I see, and we share a lot of interests and opinions. But besides from that we're complete opposites, and it's very interesting to be with them. We can learn a lot from each other, and the differences actually makes it a lot of fun. Especially since I got my diagnosis and we realized that our brains differ from each other a lot more than we thought. We're having a very interesting time talking about how our brains work.
The only downside is that our preferred environment to meet up in isn't always the same, and they like touching. But we compromise and everyone's fine.

Thinking about it, I've probably had a lot of friends that are like me, but I never knew they were friends. I only really get that someone is my friend once they say so, and I guess the extroverts are more likely to announce it.

None of my friends are socially inept, but several are quirky and interesting, which is what I like in friends.