Autism and Friendship

When I was younger, I had a lot of problems with socializing. This is not odd for a young man. Young people tend to lack the confidence and the assuredness to speak about certain things. With age comes experience and wisdom, and with those things, confidence. While youth can bring with it unearned confidence that comes with foolhardiness, self-conscious young people might feel inadequate because of what they lack. There are a lot of experiences they haven’t had yet, so it’s normal for them to feel awkward.

However, there’s a complicating factor for me: I’m autistic.

Autism spectrum disorder is a developmental disability that causes those afflicted with it to be less able to communicate with others. Autism has many symptoms, such as having more sensitive senses or odd, monomaniacal obsessions, but the core of autism as a disability is that it makes it harder to understand others and express yourself in turn. This in turn causes autistic people to exhibit a wide range of odd behaviors.

I remember reading in a textbook on child psychology (I’m not sure which one) that children could play together all day without having a single set of rules for the game. This is what I would call “social logic.” This “social logic” is something that normal people live with every day and pick up through osmosis.

This makes it difficult for autistic people to make friends. If they’re anything like me, they don’t know how to make friends because they see everyone else being friendly and feel like they don’t have an “in” with them. As a young man, whenever I came across a conversation already in progress, I felt like a third wheel. When I tried to interject, things tended to get awkward because I just couldn’t “get it.” This is a problem that has persisted with me my entire life, though I have gotten better at not sounding awkward when I enter into conversations. It mainly requires learning what the other person is talking about, asking questions about that, and coming up with polite replies and comments in response to those answers. This is a subtle art that can only be perfected through practice, but most autistic people will never get that practice because of how difficult it is for them to make friends.

How I met my best friend Alex provides a great example of how this could work. Back when I was in fourth grade, I was having trouble making friends in school. It was not that the other kids were mean to me. Rather, I never felt any connection toward them. I saw their games and would play for a time with them, but then I would leave without a word. I spent much of recess time wandering the perimeter of the playground, stuck in my fantasyland.

One day, in fourth grade, I began to realize that this was a problem. Or rather, I saw that everyone else had something that I didn’t: a schoolyard buddy. So, after school one day, I told my mom that I was having trouble making friends, that I was lonely on the playground, and that I needed her help. In response, she got out a student directory that had a list of all of my classmates with their phone numbers and told me to pick one of them at random. A bit bewildered, I looked at the directory for anything interesting. After a moment’s thought, I chose the name that I didn’t recognize yet felt familiar nonetheless. The one I chose, Alex, was the son of one of my mother’s friends. He soon became my best friend. He not only shared the same interests I did – he introduced me to several new interesting things as well, but things I wouldn’t have known about also were it not for him.

I see a lot of autistic people online who learn how to socialize using the Internet. To a certain extent, I did too, but this is a double-edged sword. People on the Internet do not socialize as they would in real life, and their relationships are shallower. As a result, a lot of autistic people will pick up bad habits and act inappropriately if they take their social cues from online media. Real-life friends who engage in real-life activities and real-life talking together are invaluable to autistic people. Even if you have to push them in rather blunt, ham-fisted ways, everyone needs friends.