DSM-5 criteria 1.a.

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I got reminded by another topic to ask this. I think I meet everything else, except for 1.a. possibly:

a. Marked deficits in nonverbal and verbal communication used for social interaction:

The problem with this one is that I pick up on non-verbal cues well, at least in my opinion. I am good at eye contact and correctly guessing the emotions of people based on their face.

The problem comes in because I don't REACT to them properly. This was explained to my by my old therapist, and also was in an old school report that I scored high on a test of social understanding, but I couldn't do it in real life.

Things included for example are my inability to flirt (lol), a hard time starting up small talk or to start a conversation (someone else has to start it first, I once encountered someone that didn't start a conversation and it was very hard to communicate) I also do not understand joking, some people can say cruel things to each other but they understand it's a joke, I don't most of the time. I only understand jokes if someone says something that is logically impossible or doesn't make sense. If someone says something mean to me I take it to heart.

Ehh, I don't expect a DX, but just want an opinion.

One thing that I don't like about DSM-V (and probably DSM-IV) is that things like what you mention here can be learned with enough time and effort. I am certainly better socially now than 10 years ago, and tons better than when I was a teen. It would be more accurate if it said something like this:

Well, I was just recently diagnosed and yet I have learned those things as well. One thing to note, is that some experts have said that adult women, in particular, are more difficult to diagnose because they often adopt "special interests" such as learning how to interpret body language and other non-verbal cues. One of my early interests as a young girl was precisely this. I checked out a ton of books from the library on understanding body language and cues. I still get it wrong a lot and am much slower to interpret these things than my NT peers, but I get by much more easily as a result of having obsessed on this topic at an early age... and yet, I was still diagnosed. It helped that I was able to explain to my interviewer/tester the process that my brain goes through in order to arrive at a conclusion that NTs seem to know intuitively.

The process I use is essentially... see behavior, cross-reference the behavior against the visual images I have in my head of other previously (and laboriously) cataloged behavior, match and react according to pre-determined responses and adjust as necessary. It's a formulaic technique that has served me well, but it is far from easy or intuitive, which is why social situations are so frustrating and exhausting and more-so the older I get. I use the exact same processing system for just about everything else in my life, but it's only in social situations that I am expected to do it within a specific time-period that is faster than I can handle for very long at a time, which is why it's so nerve-wracking.

Also, the verbal/nonverbal thing is misleading... it should be auditory vs. visual. My verbal scores were horrible, but that only means that I can't always express myself with out-loud speech very easily or quickly and I have an extremely hard time learning by just hearing... my non-verbal scores were high, which means I learn by seeing and I can express myself in written words, pictures and other unspoken ways. It confused me because I thought verbal was language ability (which I have in abundance) vs. non-verbal body language (which I lack the intuition for). Does that help?

I am 52, and there are still too many times where I am utterly clueless about the social milieu. It's freaking comical at times. All that I have learned about socializing is very shallow. It takes all of 5 minutes before I exhaust my repertoire of social chit chat.