A question for my autistic friends. Many autistic people struggle with social interactions and forming relationships, which is why they often feel lonely and isolated. I’d be interested to know how you usually go about making new connections, whether they’re friendships or romantic relationships.
I’d appreciate it if you could boost this so we can get more responses. 🙏🏻
#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #Autism #Neurodivergent #Neurodiversity @autistics
@autismunicorn @autistics All this is in hindsight (I got my diagnosis in my 40s) but I realised in my 20s I was introducing people to other people to avoid talking to them and had accidentally become quite good at facilitating networking within my niche interest groups, so I leaned into that and became the person who knew stuff and mapped the networks. In short, I made myself useful. (See also, working at events rather than just attending them.) This allowed me to filter for friends and I still have some close ones after all this time.
To be honest I have no idea how I made friends or why people wanted to be my friend, but they did and having a shared interest to bridge the fear of small talk nightmare helped a lot.
Romantic relationships I was fucking terrible at. :)
Arthur 
Pete Ashton