Growing up autistic, I always had this struggle with not only making friends but actually understanding and pinning the qualities, process, and sensibilities of someone who I feel to be a good friend. The black-box nature of relationships, at least for me, and in due part from my years and years of therapy, I feel I've come upon a very successful way of approaching relationships, friendship, and peerhood. This is partly for me, and partly to extend and fully flesh out my thoughts for a friend of mine who wanted them a few nights ago.

Short addendum

A large part of this can boil down to self-perception. If you don't feel good about yourself that should be the number one priority over all else, because if you can't like yourself than nobody could fill that hole in your mind and heart, and even if it isn't plastered all over your face or body (or if it is) you tend to filter out the people who would be most beneficial for you to be around.

Making Friends

I hold that social dynamics in totality have to have some semblance of a purpose to it, no matter what it may be. It could be acceptance, it could be sharing perspectives, it could be something as vapid as a means to an end. These are just some of the kinds of people you interact with day-to-day, and the first step to genuinely being a strong connection-builder is to grasp that, intake it, and then use that to your advantage. You need to be approached with the idea that you want to know WHY they want to talk to you and let go of WHAT they choose to talk to you about. In that same vein, if you're the person approaching someone, you need to ask WHY you felt the want to speak to them, and not WHAT you chose to speak about. The reason why? It doesn't matter.

Success in meeting people is not from instantly hitting that deep connection, it's getting to the base-level where you can test the waters with others and see how they respond before you go into what you want. Some people just flat out will not be your friend, or at worst will never be a friend to you in the way you desire. This can really, really hurt sometimes and the difficult part is that sometimes it's very hard to move on for whatever reason. Typically, that's because you never prodded the waters enough before the time investment.

How do you start small?

• Even outside of people who you want to befriend, approach people with a smile.
• Do things to get your name heard that are outside directly talking to people.
• Be perceptive. Learn to assess someone before you attempt to speak to them.
• This is the most important one: Be okay with talking about things you don't want to talk about.

Assuming you've already put effort into dissecting this person before you chose to actually put effort into befriending them, these should be easy. If you're putting yourself in any situation, be it social, professional, or even educational, that you haven't at least put thought into before doing the action, you're making a huge mistake. By nature of your unpreparedness, you've already communicated that you're not someone worth putting effort into, because it means you're using friendship to shoulder yourself on them, when you want them to see you as someone who would be a positive influence.

As for that final point, and especially as an autistic person who's done a lot of therapy: There will be conversations about topics which you don't care for. Small talk in totality can be that, and that's okay. Part of being a friendly person is the balance of your perception over your true feeling. The point is not to piss you off, but as a subconscious mutual begging to see if the other has the want or the effort to connect with on a deeper level, and if one of you doesn't want to receive it, then that shall be so.

The Nature of a Friendship

I feel many people struggle not only to make friends but to actually perceive what makes someone a good friend, which can lead them into situations where they hang around people who don't uplift them or bring them any kind of success or happiness. I have been and to an extent still am guilty of this with some people, wherein I harbor these feelings toward them that I won't share not only outwardly but even allow myself to process internally. We as humans (at least for the purposes of this essay) tend to have two major biases, those being the negative bias and the simplicity bias. Anyone who claims to be above those things is lying to you, trying to sell you on something, or doing both at the same time. It's easy to fall into the routine nature of a simple friendship, because in mine and many other's minds, what's the benefit to the outgroup? It's simple to have the perception that your friends are perfect, and even when you don't think that the proclivity toward negativity can lead you to thinking that it's not worth branching out.

So, in that, what makes a friend someone worth being around? I could branch out into many realms of possibility for this essay, but I think another list will do well at summarizing it once more.

Questions to ask yourself on the nature of your friendships

• Why do they speak to you?
• Why do you speak to them?
• What are you getting out of speaking to them?
• What are they getting out of speaking to you?
• Do they push you as a person in healthy ways? (Or do they push you at all?)
• Do you talk to them because you like them, or because you've always done so?

We've all seen the divorce rate statistics from the CDC, and how it can be explained by the divorces majorly coming from the elderly, as the youth marriage rate is comparatively nonexistent. While marriage is a different topic than friendship, I feel that the same beliefs on relationships as a homogeneity are reflected generationally rather than independently. Many people are not only too scared to approach, but also too scared to change what feels comfortable for them. You can see this in friendships as well, wherein many tend to not perceive the failings of their relationships until it boils up to the surface and creates strife for them. It's just not functional, and the same styled lack of questioning mutual interactions in a marriage can be reflected in many friendships, and if you don't practice recognizing those things it can almost feel cyclical, as if there's nothing you can change about yourself or about other people to make things work.

What It Means to be a Friend

This is another topic that I feel never gets reflected upon enough by many, as they just accept things as they are instead of how they could be, because again, it's the easiest thing to do. You need to recognize what your part in your friendships or just general social circumstance you have to play, and if you actually have some kind of unintentional but conceited purpose in behaving how you do. It's not all too hard to forget what you yourself want to be and to regain that individualism, because inherently because of social conditioning you can repress certain factors in your being. So I ask you, what does it mean to be not only a friend, but a good one at that (for yourself)?

For me, that boils down to a few things:

• Being someone who not only engages in others but is able to be fully honest with them by contrasting our experiences.
• Being someone who pushes those close to me to think differently, or at least humor the perspectives of others.
• Being someone who's never engaging in the social currency trade that is filling my social and emotional backing with the hurt of others.
• Being someone who's trustworthy enough to approach about much of anything.

These might vary person to person, so I'm focusing on my personal wants. Ultimately, I think the way you're a friend to others innately ties into your purpose of being, in that you (to some extent) will be driven to act onto others as you think is justifiable. If you can't perceive both sides of that coin, you have some level of perceptional dysfunction.

Conclusion

If I could get you to grasp just one thing about this whole essay, it would be this: Socializing is always to some extent a game of perception, especially at the beginning, and as it transforms into a deeper connection you should shift from how you're perceived by others to how you perceive them. True connection comes from a mix of the connection of how you feel about eachother, and what you get out of being around eachother.

(tl:dr: Have perspective, focus on introspection, and always be thinking about how you're viewed and how you view others.)