Given that I'm posting walls of text here anyway, lol...
I do want to get a misunderstanding out of the way; The fact that I don't crave all this social interaction doesn't mean that I'm bad at communicating with aspies or NT alike. Surely, if I were bad in expressing myself, there would be a cause why I prefer to not interact with people. I just don't have the desire to.
I'm speechless, King Oni. Not talking to your parents for 3 months when you live with them? You're certainly on an island with yourself and seem ok with that. Thing is a lot of Aspies are not like that and do care if they have friends or not. And since most people they come into contact with are NT's, there has to be a way to bridge this gap because NT's do rely heavily on hearing from their friends.
And to answer your question, even if you said once a week "Hey I don't feel like talking right now cause I'm pretty busy. I'm doing ok and I hope you are too.", I would respect that and be ok with it. At some point, though, you would have to have some at length conversation with your NT friend otherwise I just don't see it as a "friendship".
King Oni, you're very special. You could probably live your whole life without anyone and it wouldn't bother you in the least. I just don't know what to say to that.
I never pointed out I'm like the others, lol. I think that's something I've repeated many times. If there's someone not the stereotypical aspie on this board, it's me. While at the same point I'm not discrediting other people's identities on this forum. We're all quite unique, yet some probably don't fit the stereotype as much.
See, the notion is that it revolves around aspies with NT interaction. To me this topic might very well be "how do you interact with people" and it would be the same. Granted, there's a lot of NT-ness included here, including the need for reciprocal understanding and interacting, and that's fine and good people point out the relevance.
And yes, I'm well aware of the consequence that don't keeping up appearances might eventually give people a weird idea of "friendship" which one might reassess. That in turn opens the notion of "friendship". As well as "are aspie friendships different".
Here's a personal story on that; I have a friend, my childhood friend, not an aspie, but quite sure he is on the spectrum if he would be diagnosed. He lives, not even 10 minutes away from me on foot. I dated his sister for almost a decade and I'm still on good terms with him (technically I should be with her, but we decided to seperate and just go our own ways). The last time I saw him physically is 4 months ago. The last time I spoke to him through chat on the computer is almost 2 months ago. And that's the same thing as sending a text without the actual expense of your service provider in that regard. Yet I'm fine with it, he's fine with it, and if either of us wants to chat or hang out, we will do so. Chances are the next time I'll run into him will be on new years eve at a bar and it'll be another 6 months after that until I physically see him again (perhaps by chance, not even by some agreement to meet up)... and like I said, he lives within walking distance. So there's 2 of us, that are totally content with living on their own islands, which by some odd chance of fate even found eachother as 5 year olds. Yet still.. I consider him a friend; a good friend... yeah, that kinda diminished a bit, but still, he's one of the few friends I have and that's cool. Without going into too much about his personal situation; he's a programmer/game developer and the times he actually interacts with others is when it's about his job (he has his own firm) and he needs some help from the outside. Like me he doesn't struggle with communicating with people that much either... though even him as a friend; I doubt we'd get an island together, we'd still both want our own island, lol.
To make matters more interesting; I dated his sister, someone I suspect to be on the spectrum as well. She was no different. She was my girlfriend and we didn't communicate for weeks and that was perfectly fine. She was busy, I was busy. Yes, we did hang out eventually and sometimes we'd hang out a bit more and frequently, but being seperated for a month happened as well and both of us were content since she knew I was busy doing music things just like she was busy gearing up for her PhD programme.
To me friendship perhaps means knowing everything will be alright without having to check up on someone. If something really is wrong, they'll notify you. Perhaps in a sense "no news is good news".
But yes, these are aspie on aspie friendships.. and that by itself makes me wonder, like I already said; what's the inherent difference between aspie/aspie friendships and aspie/nt friendships.
"If you contact me, you're disturbing me." I am not understanding the logic here at all. Are you guys wanting friends? I don't get it. Honestly, now I don't even want to text my Aspie friend because I'm probably bothering him. The thing is his friendship means enough to me that no matter when he decides to text me I am going to answer because I care about him. That's what a real friendship is. A friend doesn't just magically show up when you want them there. A real friendship is give and take. I don't even know how some of you have gotten married because having a relationship that leads to marriage and being around someone all the time takes work. This really depresses me because when I think about it, the NT person is always going to be left disappointed and lonely in a "friendship" like that.
