I primarily ask this, because for a large part of my life, I have found it hard to build meaningful friendships with neurotypicals. I don’t know any autistic people in real life, but wonder if it would be easier for me to build friendships with them?
Or maybe this has more to do with general struggles of being autistic, rather than how alike I am to others. However, I always find neurotypicals don’t really go deep in conversation, but they enjoy small talk. Yet, I’m the complete opposite.
What has been your experience?
My closest friend is also autistic, but most of my friends are NT. Small talk is just the price of entry with a lot of people. Lemme give you an alternate definition of small talk: “Talk about safe bullshit unlikely to offend or start a fight until you know the other person well enough to expose your opinions and beliefs to possible criticism or rejection.” The substance of the conversation is meaningless. Smalltalk is about gaging a person’s body language and temper and reactions and all other manner of nonverbal signal. It’s a lot easier if you go in with the understanding that the actual words are meaningless and you barely have to pay attention to them
Yeah, that sounds exhausting. Can we skip that