- Joined
- Aug 2, 2021
This, pretty much.
Plenty of autists can and do have friends, but not necessarily on a deep personal level. The problem is that normies rely on intuitive empathy to interact with others, and autists can't do that, so any friendships they have come from basically carefully crafted performance skills. Autists who befriend other autists develop a negotiated middle ground that can be completely incomprehensible to normies, so their behavior seems even weirder in these scenarios sometimes.
The most successful autists are ones that get exposure being a fly on the wall to social interactions, and can study how people are behaving. Even then, they can come off as "fake" sometimes when they try to emulate how other people are behaving.
Ever played the game QWOP? It's a physics game where you have to learn to run by controlling individual limbs. In real life people don't run like that -- they just instinctively know how to run and use subconscious feedback from their limbs to do it. QWOP is to running in the same way how autists have to handle social situations. They can get get pretty good at it eventually with enough intellect and enough practice, but it's a rage-inducing struggle, and it will never be quite as smooth as people who just can instinctively socialize.
Incidentally, and I have nothing to back this up, but I've wondered if this is also why a lot of autists run with extremely strange gaits. It's been frequently documented but I've never seen a study that managed to come up with a reasonable hypothesis as to why.
