No friends

Are there any other people on this forum with Asperger's who literally have no friends at this point in time, and that includes being in a relationship?

I have had friends before, but not since I was 11 years old, and the friendships I had as a child usually broke down after only a few weeks. I have a history of struggling to maintain friendships, although they were enjoyable while they lasted, but once I started secondary school, making friends became completely insurmountable. I became a loner, the kid no-one talked to, and I amused myself. Not that I really minded this at the time, because I had my own interests to fall back on, and I soon came to the conclusion that small talk was too difficult, pointless, and often boring. Why bother with something that is so difficult and made me feel so stupid and tense?

However recently I have started to question whether or not I should try and make friends again. I do like company, and I don't want to spend my life alone. I want to have a soul-mate, someone I can enjoy life with, and go places with. However I need a lot of time alone as well - this is my conundrum.

Is it normal within the world of AS not to have any friends at all? At school I was excluded from friendship groups because I did not speak enough, or was too clingy!. I tried my hardest to fit in; I took on the quiet 'good girl' persona, but this did not work, so I became troublesome and annoyed people to get some social feedback. Obviously this just meant that I was singled out as weird and strange, but no one told me how to navigate the social world (I was not diagnosed until I was 21).

Although I was lucky in the sense I was not overtly bullied (I was just a loner and removed myself from the crowd), the experience of being alone while other girls chatted and laughed together has left me with an inferiority complex. I often feel diminutive both literally (I am very small anyway) and figuratively; there is a feeling that I am diseased, dirty, and completely unlikeable. Most of the time these feelings are repressed, but theu come to the surface from time to time - a legacy of social exclusion.

Am I the only one who has not had a 'friend' since childhood, if at all?

Parents

ghostrose over 10 years ago

I have never had much of a problem with making friends, but I have issues maintaining them. When you have friends there's all this pressue to 'hang out' and see them for no apparant reason and I've never much wanted to hang out for hanging out's sake, so I lose touch with people and then's they're not interested when I ask them if they want to come and see a play with me. I don't want to go round to someone's house twice a week to talk about nothing, I find it tedious and pointless. I want people to share experiences with, like going to gigs and travellng to new places. I have a husband for that now but when I was a teenager and in my early twenties I saw a lot of bands and theatre productions on my own.
I know a lot of people through work, amateur dramatics, and various other groups and clubs I belong to/have belonged to in the past but none of them are people that I can confide in. They are people to go to the pub with or see a play with, not people to talk about my problems with.
The worst thing was when I got married. My husband has a lot of family and a lot of people he has been close friends with in the past that he keeps in touch with. I probably had 2 friends of my own to invite. All the others were either shared friends we met through the same am dram group or my husbands friends that I get on quite well with. I went through all of my aquaintences and there was hardly anyone I felt close enough to invite, because they might think it was weird that I would invite them, or that I didn't know them well enough to really want them there on a day when I knew I'd feel really vulnerable.
I don't feel that I'm missing out because I don't have friends (of the 2 mentioned above one has moved away from the area and the other I have grown apart from recently, so I really don't have any friends now!). I see enough people socially. My social limit generally has a shelf life of about 3 hours anway, if I'm with the same group of people for more than that I start feeling like I need to escape so I start to shut down and stop communicating.

Reply

ghostrose over 10 years ago

I have never had much of a problem with making friends, but I have issues maintaining them. When you have friends there's all this pressue to 'hang out' and see them for no apparant reason and I've never much wanted to hang out for hanging out's sake, so I lose touch with people and then's they're not interested when I ask them if they want to come and see a play with me. I don't want to go round to someone's house twice a week to talk about nothing, I find it tedious and pointless. I want people to share experiences with, like going to gigs and travellng to new places. I have a husband for that now but when I was a teenager and in my early twenties I saw a lot of bands and theatre productions on my own.
I know a lot of people through work, amateur dramatics, and various other groups and clubs I belong to/have belonged to in the past but none of them are people that I can confide in. They are people to go to the pub with or see a play with, not people to talk about my problems with.
The worst thing was when I got married. My husband has a lot of family and a lot of people he has been close friends with in the past that he keeps in touch with. I probably had 2 friends of my own to invite. All the others were either shared friends we met through the same am dram group or my husbands friends that I get on quite well with. I went through all of my aquaintences and there was hardly anyone I felt close enough to invite, because they might think it was weird that I would invite them, or that I didn't know them well enough to really want them there on a day when I knew I'd feel really vulnerable.
I don't feel that I'm missing out because I don't have friends (of the 2 mentioned above one has moved away from the area and the other I have grown apart from recently, so I really don't have any friends now!). I see enough people socially. My social limit generally has a shelf life of about 3 hours anway, if I'm with the same group of people for more than that I start feeling like I need to escape so I start to shut down and stop communicating.

Children

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