I’m 30 and horrible at keeping friends. I don’t know if it’s the unschooling or the autism, but I’m told I come across as hostile when I think I’m being nice.

I know the basics. I make eye contact but not too much, I ask people about themselves and their interests to show I’m interested, I don’t dominate conversations with myself and my own interests. I try to be a nice person people might want to keep around, too— I give money when someone’s in a pinch, I remember birthdays, I help move, et cetera.

Eventually people either people tell me I’m being a dick in ways I never realized, or more likely, they just eventually stop messaging me back.

The one thing I’m sure I struggle with is body language. I’ve read a lot that you need to mirror the other person’s body language, but I don’t know how to do that. Especially since I normally meet people at work and we’re usually pushing big carts around and moving products and I’m just not thinking about my body as something expressive, just practical.

I’m sure I have many more blind spots that I’m not even aware of.

So like… are there classes for this? Some kind of specialized therapy? I don’t really want to try anymore unless I can stop being a dick

  • ThiefOfNames she/her@beehaw.orgEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    One possibility is that it’s how you phrase things? Everything seems fine here but people tend to write and speak differently, so just throwing out a possibility here.

    I used to say essentially “not my fault” a lot as a kid (it was a kind of deflection that I resorted to instead of actually dealing with stuff), and my mom called me out on it once, which caused a huge shift in how i thought about communication from then on. See, sometimes it was my fault, and other times it wasn’t, but that doesn’t really matter a lot in a conversation, so I started kinda taking a mental step back to consider what I was about to say would actually accomplish in the conversation, or how it might be perceived by others, and it became clear to me that I had some other bad conversational habits as well that escalated situations when they didn’t need to.

    It might not be easy to detect all of them at once, but just getting into the mindset of thinking about this stuff might help. Hopefully this technique isn’t why I’m anxious these days :P

    Edit: Also some subjects are sore as you experienced with your unemployed friend, so having this habit of taking a step back might have helped with realizing that in advance. It’s not always doable of course, you can’t know everything.

    • Alice@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      One possibility is that it’s how you phrase things? Everything seems fine here but people tend to write and speak differently, so just throwing out a possibility here.

      Maybe? I feel like I try too hard to be polite sometimes. My last therapist told me I was allowed to ask my friends for better ways to phrase things, but they got mad and said I was putting them on the spot.

      Last time I explicitly said, “sorry, that was my fault,” and explained what I did wrong, and my friend still took it as me calling him stupid.

      I’m beginning to think it’s just too complex for anyone to explain to me how to be nice

      Also some subjects are sore as you experienced with your unemployed friend, so having this habit of taking a step back might have helped with realizing that in advance. It’s not always doable of course, you can’t know everything.

      What do you do when you accidentally bring up a sore subject? Last time, I apologized and said I should have realized (I should have), and my friend and I got into a two-day argument about whether it was a sincere apology or not. I finally asked what I did to deserve being accused of lying and he just said “well if I had said that I’d mean it manipulatively, so I assumed you did”. So apologizing in that scenario is taken as manipulative, right?

      • Jimbo@yiffit.netEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        Last time, I apologized and said I should have realized (I should have), and my friend and I got into a two-day argument about whether it was a sincere apology or not. I finally asked what I did to deserve being accused of lying and he just said “well if I had said that I’d mean it manipulatively, so I assumed you did”. So apologizing in that scenario is taken as manipulative, right?

        I mean… I think you did the right thing here. Hard to say without any context, but your friends kinda sound like dicks, like really taking offense at small things that really don’t matter that much.

        Sorry, not sure what you should do with this take, just that maybe the problem is not entirely you.

        • Alice@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
          3·
          2 months ago

          I considered this, but the fact that it’s been two different friends plus my sister made me think I was the one being a dick.

      • ThiefOfNames she/her@beehaw.orgEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        Its certainly harder to explain over text since we can’t hear your tone. Do you put in a lot of effort when you speak ? Does talking come naturally, or do you spend a lot of energy trying to be polite ?

        well if I had said that I’d mean it manipulatively

        Without knowing exactly what you said its hard to know if this reflects more on your friend than you. Apologizing should be fine, so the issue is either how you apologized or your friend. Also a two day argument is a long argument. Who kept it going? Who would bring it up first?

        Edit: I see in one comment that you are autistic. Have you talked to your friends and family about what this means in a conversation ? At some point its on them, honestly.

        • Alice@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
          2·
          2 months ago

          Its certainly harder to explain over text since we can’t hear your tone. Do you put in a lot of effort when you speak ? Does talking come naturally, or do you spend a lot of energy trying to be polite ?

          It definitely takes a lot of energy. Using the right tone, making the correct amount of eye contact, listening to what the other person is saying, and not talking so long to come up with a reply that they get mad at me, feels like multitasking. I really try, though.

          Also a two day argument is a long argument. Who kept it going? Who would bring it up first?

          I guess we both kept it going. I should have dropped it but I hated leaving the conversation with him thinking I was lying. That’s another problem I know I need to work on.

          Edit: I see in one comment that you are autistic. Have you talked to your friends and family about what this means in a conversation ? At some point its on them, honestly.

          I’ve talked about autism before, but two of my friends are autistic and the other has a TBI, so they told me it wasn’t really fair for me to expect them to hold my hand and explain everything I was doing wrong, which I think is fair. As for my family, there’s no talking about psych stuff with them.

          Either way I’d rather learn social skills than ask everyone I meet to let me be rude since I’m autistic. No one’s going to want to put up with that.