Do people mock your need to make friends?

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It happened to me a lot in my life. Certainly at school it did. People might say "Keeno is my friend" to be mocking, or mock the fact someone was friendly with me.

People even had that level of immaturity at university. I even remember graffiti appearing on the seats of a lecture theatre that said "Keeno is my friend" as a mock.

Even when I attended a church, people did this sort of crap. Someone I became good friends with there said they got comments like "Oh I didn't think you'd get on with Keeno??!?" and "But he's got Asperger's!!?!".

It doesn't really happen now because I have made more appropriate social niches thanks to autism facilities. But it can be a very annoying part of being neurodiverse. People were basically mocking my need to make friends, my desire for human connection, almost as if I was too neurodiverse and idiosyncratic to deserve to have any human connection.

I suppose that if this happens to someone, it's also a telltale indicator that the person would probably not be able to achieve so much depth as a romantic connection with someone. But I digress.

The same thing happened to me. Sometimes people would pretend to be my friends, they would tell me they were my friends just to mock me. I was happy that someone would want to talk to me. They would pretend to have an interest in what I had to say. Eventually, I realized they were only making fun of me. Whenever someone said they were my friends, I told them I didn't need friends.

Possibly 2 different things there - sounds like the church people weren't mocking your need........maybe more like wanting to establish you as an inferior? The vicar clearly isn't getting through to some of his flock.

I think mocking is mostly a young person's thing, especially with that level of blatant sadistic cruelty. Best defense, learn to be unashamed of your needs. I'm extremely lonely and I need friends too. If anybody wants to snigger at that, I'd like to meet them.

No doubt they wanted to establish me as an inferior. However there may be a different dynamic here, in that perhaps the minister was getting through to his flock all right when it comes to AS. He could hardly be described as Aspie friendly; at a Christian conference there was a faith healing session, and the minister harassed and harassed and harassed me into participating in it in order to heal my "illness". You see, I was completely unable to get through to him that AS is not an illness.

No, I'm not ashamed at all of my need to make friends. The mocking is just an annoying aspect and I was thinking of it today.

I've come to think that Aspie perceptions of what constitutes friendship differ quite a lot from that of other people. I think some (not very nice) NTs may notice this and develop a bad attitude about it.

I do find that most of my friends that I've ever considered close friends were either very Aspie like - perhaps undiagnosed Aspies - or introverts. I don't tend to get on well with extroverted people. They don't get me, and usually want to "fix" me by insisting I be more social.

There was one woman I worked with who got into this weird little snarky thing where she made small talk with me. I'd respond politely - I had nothing in common with her. But I eventually realized she was making a show of it and laughing to herself about it - the fact that I never said more than a few polite words to her. It was like her little private joke.

I haven't encountered that very often.

But then I'm not really someone who feels a need to make friends. If it happens it happens. To me it's like love, it can't be forced.

Strewth, what a set of jerks they are. If it doesn't fit into their highly restricted view of the world, they just force it to fit. Hope you got your money back when they failed to turn you into an NT.

Good that you don't get embarrassed about social needs. I used to. I found it much easier to hit back when I threw that off and saw myself as normal. There's no easier target for ridicule than somebody who is being a complete as*hole about a normal human emotion.

Yes, I got this all the time as a child and I suspect people are doing it to me now as well. Some people claim to be my friends but I have the feeling they're ony doing it as a joke: there's a clear difference between how they act toward me and toward their real friends. Apparently I seem stupid enough not to pick up on it. I wish I was.

I remember when I was about 13 at school I was sitting next to a girl in my class who let me sit next to her, and the teacher had let us into the classroom but had gone off somewhere to get something, so everyone was sitting and talking, and the girl next to me had sprawled her pens from her pencil-case out on to the table and was fiddling around (not sure what she was doing). Then a girl who she knew from the classroom next door came in to get some textbooks, and she said a few words to the girl sitting next to me, then I heard her ask, in a critical way, ''why are you sitting next to Josie?'' And the girl next to me went quiet then said, nervously but grinning, ''she's my friend!'' I could tell in her voice that she didn't mean it nicely, she just didn't know what else to say. I felt annoyed after that because if I was popular or just an average NT I doubt she would've asked her that.