Friendship: What is it? Feedback wanted from NTs & autistics

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There seem to at least several people here who don’t understand what friendship is or how it develops.

So, I’ve decided to create a list of what I see as the essential components of friendship. I would appreciate feedback from both autistic people and NT’s: Have I left out anything important?

Friendship usually begins with at least one, and often two or more, of the following:

1) Having fun together. Usually this means either (a) participating together in an activity that you both enjoy or (b) talking to each other about topics you both are interested in. It also helps if at least one person is good at cracking jokes that the other one enjoys; this may or may not be an absolute requirement, depending on the individuals.
2) Mutual understanding, empathy, and sympathy regarding each other’s personal lives. This is easiest with people similar to oneself; the more similarities, the easier.
3) Comradeship, an emotional bond formed by facing common challenges together. (War buddies are the most extreme example. Other examples may include (a) teammates on a sports team, (b) volunteers working together on a political campaign or a charitable project that they are passionate about, (c) groups of parents advocating together on behalf of their children, and (d) groups of disadvantaged people of some particular kind advocating together on behalf of themselves.
4) Freedom to be oneself, and mutual acceptance of each other’s relatively unmasked selves. (By “unmasked,” I am referring to the ordinary kind of social masking that NT’s do, as well as the more arduous kind of masking that many autistic people do in order to try to pass as NT.)

As friendship deepens, it gradually evolves to encompass at least most of the following, as well as at least most of the above:

5) Trust. Safety in confiding in each other. This should develop only very slowly and cautiously for those of us who are not good judges of character, and should never extend to sharing things like passwords. Love many, trust few.
6) Caring about each other’s well-being.
7) Doing favors for each other, ideally motivated by mutual caring. In a genuine friendship this is NOT treated as a business transaction, with rigid score-keeping, but it does need to avoid being too one-sided.

Friendship does NOT require spending huge amounts of time with each other in person. To nourish a friendship, it is necessary to get together in person at least sometimes, either one-on-one or, more commonly, with a small group of other friends . But, for most people these days, it’s okay if most of their communication with their friends is online. (As recently as a decade ago, most women spent a lot of time talking to their friends on the phone; this apparently has largely been replaced by online contact.)

As far as I can tell, the basic components of friendship, as listed above, are the same for autistic people and NT’s, although there are differences in what kinds of things these these ingredients of friendship consist of, and there are differences in how these ingredients of friendship can best be established and communicated.

For example, NT's usually grease the wheels of all of the above components of friendship via some sort of magic involving nonverbal communication that I don't understand. I compensate for this lack by seeking strong forms of intellectual companionship around common intense interests. Indeed, for me, the first item on my list, "having fun together," primarily involves intellectual companionship around special interests, whereas the focus is different for most people.

I was thus able to make quite a few friends when I was in my twenties, and some more friends later. (Alas, nearly all of my friends are now either dead or drifted apart. I now hope to build a new network of friends via the local autistic community.)

There are different types of friendships. Some are closer than others. For me, my personal scale goes like this:

-Stranger (haven't met).

-Acquaintance (know vaguely, but not much).

-Distant friend (we might get on, however we're still not all that close. Still, I could see myself being friends with them in the future perhaps. Or maybe we used to be friends, but have drifted apart a lot).

-Friend (The conversation isn't anything deep, but it's fun to be around them. Hanging out and casual talk).

-Good friend (A person I know well enough and comfortable around that friend seems like an understatement. I've probably known them for a long time).

-Close friend (Someone who I could share my deepest fears and insecurities with. It feels like I've known them forever. They're one of the first people I would go to for help, to vent, or just talk about anything).

-Best friend (A person who isn't just one of the first people, they are the first).

The friendship can change, I might know someone who I considered to be a close friend gradually drift back into being a distant friend. Perhaps even becoming a stranger again. Granted, I know them, but as they change and we lose contact we become unknown to each other...as if we're strangers once more.

If I have enough common ground or a shared experience with someone, I might skip a step on the scale (or a few, or several). Depends how the situation plays out.

It means having someone who really likes you, and makes that known to you.

I don’t dig the tit for tat obligatory crap.

And measuring what your friend does for you vs what you do for them.

Interesting breakdown. I don't know where my social connections fit into this framework, however.

The bridesmaid at my 2016 wedding was a lady I took several graduate school teaching courses with in 2010-12. We also attended the same church for a couple or so years before I moved, and we met a couple of times for coffee back then. We still keep in touch through Facebook. I believe she is the only person left from my college years whom I still contact in some way. She's never been offended or fazed by all my autistic quirks.

I had one other good friend in my undergrad years who took down her social media account a year or two ago and moved to South Korea, so we are no longer in contact, but I saved the really nice picture she drew of me and sent to me online during our last correspondence. We knew each other from 2002-2017.

As far as other contacts, I get along well with my boss to the point where we can discuss certain things like religion and such now in between shifts. We both work a ton of hours, though, so probably no time left over for friendship type stuff. I've been at this job since December 2018 and plan to stay with it until a church trip to Greece in July 2020, and plans for a child after that.

I also occasionally associate with my husband's supervisors and their wives, although only at functions like weddings, open house gatherings, tabletop gaming, and the like. We're all friends on FB, but I don't interact with them much through that medium.

There are a couple of women I've interacted with a fair bit during Wednesday night church dinners that started in the fall of last year. We recently also connected on FB, and things are going well there, too. The church dinners resume in September, so time will reveal how these relationships continue to develop. There's more of an age gap here, as I believe these ladies are old enough to be my mother, but they're very well-educated and well-traveled, so we're able to discuss lots of neat things.

That's the extent of what might be considered friendships in my social circle.