honestly? The internet.

I made a friend in school (because they immediately realized I was also autistic) that I keep in touch with, but the rest of my relationships have mostly been internet-based.

It's scary to reach out, but it can be rewarding too

honestly? Pretty much all of my connections are superficial, or work-related. The exceptions are:

1. My wife - she basically did all the running as I was utterly oblivious to the fact she was interested.
2. My children - that’s just a different relationship all round.
3. One old school friend who for some reason has just always “got” me.

My best friendships all came from the same source: the local Star Trek club (which was a long time ago now). That's not to say that this specifically will work for others, but being able to share common interests is a big plus for us. And in my case it had the added benefit of meeting people with similar values as well. I'm sure that this combination resulted in a high proportion of the members being ND of some variety, which also helps.

Beyond that, yeah, it hard as hell. Even with my little friend group it's hard to do things with them any more due to various circumstances and I'd really like to find a few more such friends.

honestly, after so many years of being treated badly, i just don’t

if something forms on its own naturally through no effort, great, but i do not go out of my way anymore

that said, i’m not typical in that i do not mind being alone all the time

@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. 😀

Well, I’m getting adopted. Or I’m meeting other neurodivergent people. It’s best if I’m adopted by neurodivergent people. Most of the time, they’re people with ADHD. For some reason, that works out perfectly. So as a young person with undiagnosed ADHD and autism, I actually had something resembling a social life, even though I was always the very strange guy who somehow fit in, but whom people didn’t really know what to do with. By the way, it always took years or even decades before it became clear that my friends were neurodivergent themselves.

@autistics

The internet.
Forums at first, and then Twitter when it was still 'normal'.
Now Mastodon.

I can take time to process the interactions, and decide how I might want to respond. I can then respond, even after some time has passed, and my response will be perfectly acceptable.

Also, I can deal with one voice at a time, and there is often a thread to follow so I can go back to see who said what to whom and when. That is so much easier than in a pub, for example, where people are speaking partial sentences, speaking over each other, and sharing unspoken information that might change the meaning and context of the words spoken.

I have made a few connections and friends from IRL contact, but they have been specific 1-1s for a purpose that then experienced 'mission creep' beyond that initial need.

All of the IRL friends I have currently I’ve made all thanks to a shared hobby. As in we all met in person, plucked up the courage to see how a joke might land and went from there. Now we hang out at least once a week thanks to the shared hobby, and message each other almost daily.

I did meet my partner online, but that was almost 20 years ago, when times were a bit different.
I do have friends around the world, too, thanks to the Internet and in the past few years Mastodon specifically. I have even met face to face with some of these fedi people I’ve made friends with.
But for more personal and deeper connections, I prefer making friends in person.

Work, online and community work.

I met my ex and wife online (AOL back in the day, and a dating site in the mid naughties). As I moved 300 miles to live with my ex, I lost touch with my childhood friends, and ended up with no proper friends, other than work colleagues for about 10 years. When I moved again to be with my now wife, I was still without other friends until I joined a club, and later started up a makerspace. Although that fell apart, I'm still friends with some people, though I haven't seen most of them much since my burnout started.

I've met lots of asd people in kink spaces, in furry spaces, trans spaces, and in hobbies like amateur radio and rail modeling.

I think kink, furry, and trans spaces are friendly because people are used to communicating far more forthrightly. All the secret coding and implied hierarchies that are so frustrating get expressed verbally.

I feel like neurodivergent people often love talking about specific stuff, they just hate small talk.

I never really had friends or a social life until college. Made some real friends once I actually became active online. We got internet when I was 12, but I mostly used it to feed my obsession with G Gundam and Tenchi Muyo, while ignoring chatrooms and forums. Talking to people online or otherwise was the last thing on my mind.

But I found my first group of friends on GaiaOnline, roleplaying, and later we all moved to Skype to talk about games, anime, etc. My whole social life revolved around writing, branching out to Proboards to make more friends, and so on. Everyone I dated (including my gf) were roleplayers.

And ever since I stopped rping 6-8 years ago, I guess social media kinda filled that void? Mastodon did at least. I do find the concept of friendship perplexing, however.

For me it’s mostly been people I work with. Though I’m really not that close to anyone.

I’ve only recently discovered I’m AuDHD, but the world let me know, from an early age, that I was not “normal”.

I tend to think I annoy people after a period of time, so I recede from connections after a while. I’m really happiest doing my own thing.

Romantic connection has always been a super weird space for me. I’ve been married forever, but only had one short relationship before dating my wife.

I had lots of friendly women classmates/co-workers when I was younger, but it always felt like expressing interest/dating was for other people – who knew what they were doing.

i don't have any trouble being friends if we have autistic traits that match (and, non-autists can have autistic traits!)

the trick is, finding such people. there's no science to it; it's just luck. But the internet helps *a lot*.

Slowly. Masked. I don't initiate contact but instead let random collisions do their work.

If they're NT, I handle them like potential abusers until they show they can be trusted. If they are able and willing to do so: most don't even understand what is at stake for me.

I don't have any trouble walking up to people (after being in the same space with them for more than a minute--too fast is creepy) and articulating in the form of a question something I noticed about them that they probably want noticed, something self-expressive vs. necessarily appearance-related. They put it out there on purpose, and I'm indicating it was safe with me to do that.

The problem is when they recommend a follow-up thing I can do, I'm just not there.
@autistics

For friends, it is usually shared or overlapping hyperfocus interests. Anything we can "geek out about" helps build kinship.

For romantic interests, because one of my hyperfocus hobbies is writing, I typically started with writing poems and short stories for them. They are either about them or about something in which they are interested. I would take time to learn about the things they like first just by listening and observation. And if we didn't end up romantic, we could still end up friends.

I used to do Tarot readings for people as a way to make friends but I'm extremely out of practice. I did natal charts twice by hand but it was far too much work.

Nowadays, I haven't made new friends in a very long time. I have acquaintances from Fediverse and work friends, but that is all. I would like to know what works today, in our extremely online but also still in a pandemic reality.