Making friends - a guide for autistic adults

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https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-gu ... tic-adults

Making friends - a guide for autistic adults

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What can I do about it?
Planning and developing social interaction
It might be useful to plan in times where you can either meet existing friends and family or look to meet new people. You might want to use a timetable or schedule for your week.

Routines can provide reassurance and comfort, but can limit social interaction with other people. In order to overcome restrictive routines, you could plan to:

gradually introduce change by identifying one new place to go to every week - for example a local shop

focus on places where it is possible to meet new people. In time, you may get to know people you see regularly

practise a few bits of small talk, such as 'How are you today?'. This may help to reduce your anxiety about making contact with people.

Managing anxiety 
Anxiety can limit your ability to socialise. If you experience extreme levels of anxiety in social situations, it might be useful to talk about this with your GP. A medical professional should be able to offer support and advice and may be able to signpost you towards support services.

Qualified counsellors can often offer information on techniques that may reduce anxiety and develop social skills. Sometimes advice can be provided via the phone or email or a home visit may be arranged.

The NHS often offers counselling following a GP’s referral. It is important to contact a qualified counsellor with specialist knowledge and understanding of the autism. 

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(Click on the link to read the rest of the article)
https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-gu ... tic-adults

My take:

Sometimes I am happy just interacting with my nuclear family. Or people at work. Or people in "real life" groups I am a member of.

Sometimes I just post here on WP.

Other times I really feel lonely and isolated and alone - and I don't want to be.
I recently asked an acquaintance if he wanted to get together for lunch some time. He explained he was busy and had plans.
I said "well we can catch up some time and talk about lunch". And he said "Maybe, and maybe not".
About then my anxiety and defenses kicked in.

I've read the guide and I think it's very good. I like how everything is clear and simple.

This is nice and it seems like it would be helpful to someone who is very isolated to have at least some interaction with other people, which can help to feel less alone. But this will not help make actual friends. It is a guide to talk to people in such a way that they will likely respond with a degree of politeness rather than being put off or even offended.

The reason that I find it difficult to make friends, even with people who already like me and are acquaintances, is that I am awkward, so it makes people uncomfortable to have a conversation with me, because it is stilted and I sometimes don't know what to say or will say something that pops into my head out of desperation that is not interesting to them and might even be a bit weird.

This guide will not help with that. To make friends you have to make a real connection with someone, whereby they are pleased to talk to you and look forward to seeing you. Although I appear to be very ordinary and not autistic, I am not able to be warm and to connect. At best I can make polite conversation and try to leave the conversation before I have made someone uncomfortable.

I also strongly disagree with the advice that you should ask whether they want to keep on talking about something or ask them how they feel, certainly not how they feel about your current interaction. (Though you could ask very generically, "How are you feeling today," or something like that.) That is very awkward and is sure to make the other person uncomfortable.

Fenn, every time I see a thread started by you I think "What the heck?! I don't remember starting that thread!" and then I realize that it says "Fenn" not "Fern"

I agree with what Bee33 said. Most of the advice in that article doesn't seem appropriate for me, but there were a few ideas with perhaps an iota of usefulness in them. Here they are, along with my thoughts:

focus on places where it is possible to meet new people. In time, you may get to know people you see regularly
I hardly know anywhere like that, but the principle seems a good one - i.e. I'm not likely to make new friends if I never meet anybody new. "Places where it is possible to meet new people" conjurs up bad memories of going to parties etc. where I would simply get ignored, which is a very unpleasant, embarrassing, and demoralising experience. I seem to be inexorably picky about who I take a liking to, and most mainstream people tend to bore me, so it's rather like looking for needles in a haystack. These days I don't even know if I could itemise the traits of the kind of people I like, so to extend the analogy, it's as if I'm a blind man looking for those needles, and I'm not even sure they exist any more.

practise a few bits of small talk, such as 'How are you today?'. This may help to reduce your anxiety about making contact with people.
I think that's of very limited use to me because although I can do it if I make a big enough effort, it feels phony - I'm a deep person and I don't get any social satisfaction from small talk. And when I do push myself to ask those kinds of questions, what usually happens is that we quickly run out of things to say to each other, there's an embarrassed pause, and then the other person makes an excuse to go and talk to somebody else. OTOH it might be a good idea for me to dream up a few questions designed to sniff out common interests and attitudes, and to look for possible common purposes - I like doing practical things with people.


Qualified counsellors can often offer information on techniques that may reduce anxiety and develop social skills. Sometimes advice can be provided via the phone or email or a home visit may be arranged.
In theory I could benefit from good advice in the social skills department (social anxiety isn't that much of a problem for me unless I'm stuck with the wrong kind of people), but I suspect it would take an uncommonly good counsellor who was a good fit for somebody as unusual as I am. It's not just ASD, I think I'm a rather unusual Aspie as well.


The NHS often offers counselling following a GP’s referral. It is important to contact a qualified counsellor with specialist knowledge and understanding of the autism. 
Interesting assertion. When I handed in my private diagnosis, my GP said the only thing she could offer me was sedatives and antidepressants if I got too anxious or depressed, and so far I haven't. I rather think that trying to get an appointment to explore a referral for a counsellor would be an uncomfortable waste of time. I gather the NHS is bogged down with a huge backlog of work because of the effects of the pandemic, and they were notorious for fobbing me off with nothing a long time before Covid.