Prepared to give Aspie friend another chance

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You may remember me making a thread about one of my Aspie friends whose traits are starting to irritate me. He phoned today to check if I was back from holiday, and wasn't as hot-headed or arrogant as last time. I diplomatically said to him that when he analyses people he can sound rude, and he admitted that he sometimes does it on purpose, pretending to use AS as an excuse. He did apologise for that, which I was quite moved to hear.

I'm meeting up with him again tomorrow at his house, and would like to discuss some more of how his traits can be irritating to others, in a diplomatic way. When do you think the best time would be to do this? Perhaps when one of his traits (e.g. self-opinionatedness and arrogance) suddenly appears?

I changed my mind about this and decided to carry on the friendship, but if I do get irritated further, then I'll take action.

You are a good friend for discussing his behaviors that upset you trust me I wish I had that. If I have any behavior issue it's never thinking about my behavior I try just to let my behavior flow and don't worry about upsetting people. Sadly though when looking at it I was in the principals office daily in Elementary and then in College got suspended and then at my first job the topic of Sexual Harassment got brought up and I have zero friends so IMO for me it's about learning about my behavior and what's right and wrong and how to behave what's to say I might not get fired or WORSE put in jail because of something I said or did. So it's good you are discussing his issues that upset you good job!! !! !

If the annoying behaviour carries on even after you have clearly spelled out that it is annoying and why, a good tactic may to do the same thing back to him. That might get it through easier than just stating it.

An example; my brother who is aspie always had a really irritating habit. When he came round to visit he would walk into the room and if people were watching TV he would look at what was on TV and decide whether or not HE wanted to watch that program. Then, if he decided he didn't want to watch it, even if 3 or 4 people were clearly watching he would just pick up the remote and turn the TV off, or change channel without a word to anyone.

It was explained to him by several people many many times about how this was extremely rude and disrespectful and made it look as though he just had total contempt for the people that he had supposedly wanted to come and visit!

I realise we aspies don't always pick up on signals and can seem to lack empathy but this was not a case of missing subtle NT signals/body language/code, this was explained to him clearly and literally and he continued to do it. I think after he was told about it he continued to do it on purpose to wind us up.

Then one day, I noticed he was really intently watching a TV program so I picked up the remote and turned it off. He had a complete meltdown. When I explained to him that I did it to show him what it was like, at the time he just started screaming "I do NOT do that!!". However, I think it slowly sunk in.

Since then, I haven't seen him do the TV thing again.