mac266 wrote:
I have Asperger's, but I'm 31 years old and just found out. I've always had difficulty with eye contact, but not with babies. I make eye contact with babies just fine. Does anyone else experience that?
This is because the child is not challenging or antagonizing you. When looking at others, don't lock gazes. You want to look their faces over, as if you are taking their measure, and pretend that you are reading a book. This is what they're doing to you. You just have to learn it, whereas they do it naturally. When gazes lock, our natural instinct is to tense up and either retreat or attack. With most people, you want to be careful to avoid this, and keep the timeframe for actually being gaze-locked with another person at a maximum of a half-second at a time. You are able to get away with this when you are dealing with babies and animals because neither will challenge you.
It's actually true. If you watch NTs for a while, you will notice that they rarely actually gaze-lock. Their eye contact is friendly and gentle. You want to handle something like eye contact delicately, as if it were something fragile and precious. You want to brush your gaze across another's as if with a fine paintbrush on a delicate canvas. You want to paint their eyes with yours as you would delicate eggs. As you move your eyes around, envision paths being traced by them in the air, and insure that the lines you make are pleasant ones. When you have completed this, a working of perhaps between one half of a second and a breath, you should be able to relax and make simple eye contact. Think of it as the docking of two spacecraft. It cannot be done well recklessly.
The more difficult matter, however, is figuring out just what in the hell you're saying, so you don't mistakenly say, "I want you to take out your samurai sword, and shave my butt," or, "I like children. I like your children." It's a language all its own, part of it instinctive and part of it cultural. However, immediate gaze-locking is almost always taken as a sign either of hostility or sexual advance. The only exception is between parties whose social positions between one another are already perfectly clear, in which case the matter isn't quite as delicate, simply because all of the rules are written and memorized.
However, sometimes I do like to pick random women and give them my best "psycho" gaze. Hehehehe, it's fun to watch them turn all white and cower away, HAHAHAHAHA! Carve RIGHT INTO the ray of their vision like a blunt sword, hehehe! They never see it coming!