You don't need to make much effort when making friends

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nonverbal communication is a language.
It is important not only to learn how to read it but also how to write it.

I've always thought the double empathy issue is a critical point when it comes to forming relationships. I'm pretty good at telling the extent to which I can connect with a person based on first contact, even if it's brief. A really strong click is considerably more likely to happen if the other person is autistic.

Autism wasn't even on my radar until I was 35, so I've got the benefit of a large sample that's unbiased by perception of my own autism. I didn't realize my best friend was autistic until after I learned I was. We'd never discussed it before; he was surprised I /didn't/ know I was. Apparently I'm "not exactly a well-hidden case" lol.

I still don't click with even the vast majority of autistic people, but that's to be expected. In the ~14 months since I started hanging out in autistic spaces, I've met more people I have that distinctive click with than I had in the decade before that point.

I still have close relationships with NT people; that's definitely possible despite the double empathy problem. It's rarer, but there are way more NTs than there are of us. So at least for me, there are still a good number of NTs who I could be good friends with. The problem has always been finding them. It takes much more effort and time to find one NT I fit with than to find one autistic person, because I have to sort through - to make numbers up - 1,000 NTs but only 100 autistic people before it happens.

Here's what I think instead;

It's not simply about being toxic, but being resonating to others even if it meant being a bit toxic.

This coincides with the double empathy problem -- either one party should 'level' to accommodate another.
NTs generally refuses to bridge the gap themselves and expects NDs to accommodate them -- mostly because, it's an NT's space.


So one's in a place where being nice is cast upon suspicion and dissonance -- then turn the niceness down a bit.

If one's being too nice yourself, then someone may feel like they're obligated to follow the same courtesy, which made them a bit less comfortable, or worse -- either to avoid guilt, or read this one as someone desperate to be picked by not being not appearing authentic enough.

If one's being blunt themselves, then someone is will likely follow the trend.
There's a good chance a person would be comfortable because there's little to no 'obligation' to return 'niceness'.
Of course it had to be done in moderation and authentically.

At least those are the basics, I think, usually in a suspicious or in a competitive culture or spaces.
One had to know when and where to apply said message.

And to know where and when -- one would figure how to read the room first.

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Lose more time here - Updates at least once a week.

people at work and sometimes even my husband call me hitler because i am most the things on the second list but to a higher degree than most people

I think the bulk of the items on the "second list" are Cluster-B personality traits (i.e. narcissism, psychopathy, histrionic personality, etc.) - yeah, either that, or a Hitler-like hardcore authoritarian personality with Machiavellian leanings.


Like I said earlier: the "goal", such as it is, is calibrating your presentation to others between the two list extremes.
You can't have porous boundaries in being overly nice to others, a form of over-compensating for our social screw-ups in not intuiting proper response or "reading between the lines". Because some people, regrettably, will exploit that sense of guilt and shame - ask you for occasional favours and then pretend you don't exist, no reciprocity

I think what kind of "weirds NTs out" is when we exhibit mild "second list" behaviours, but being unaware that these behaviours are offensive. Whereas some "popular" NTs knowingly exhibit more intensive "second list" behaviours, and it shows that they are aware of them and hence "in control" - and folks think that this is someone who's got social and resource options if they behave like this, so hey, they must be allright in my book!! !

So, yeah, when I think back on that lame advice some well-wishers offered to "do everything on the 'first list' and you'll have lots of friends", that was using hyperbole and something we (or I) tended to take at face value. This banal advice was brought to you by the same amorphous entity that told you to reason with bullies or tell them firmly you don't like what they're doing (heaven forbid they should advise you to ambush them with physical force), or the morons who said that when a young woman is looking for a "nice guy", then you should be that nice guy to a tee and she'll be all yours

We may not be fully in a Hobbesian "state of nature", but humankind still retains some dark vestiges of its evolutionary past.

this thread puts this song to mind