Learn to be social before trying to be in a relationship

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Sorry guys, another topic about aspie guys and relationships. I've read so many bitter posts lately - specifically defeatist ones stating "I'm aspie and therefore there's nothing I can do to improve my chances of being in a relationship", and thought I may as well post it as a topic and get flamed down for it in the hope that some people will read it and understand what I'm trying to say (it's not the easiest thing to explain).

Firstly, being aspie is no excuse not to improve socially. Believe it or not, even NT's are constantly working on their social skills (*gasp* shock horror!). Take it from someone who knows NT's very well.

Being good socially, and suave romantically doesn't come to anyone naturally.

That being said, it took me 12 years of HARD WORK and throwing myself in the line of fire constantly to get to the point now where I am the social (not romantic) equal of your average NT. I'm not saying that it's possible for every aspie of my age to be advanced to the point where I am; I know I am lucky and my aspergers is relatively mild compared to most. But that's not the point I'm trying to make here. Romantically - I am just beginning to learn, but I am sure it will take an equal amount of time and effort and rejection to get there.

A good analogy for it is like fighting a war - there's no point in giving up, you just take your losses and keep on fighting. Even if it's a war we can never win, we can at least gain ground as we go. If we just give up and retreat, we'll never get anywhere in life.

I see too many aspies with the attitude of "there's no point in trying", but then those same aspies complain about how miserable they are and how much rejection they get as though they don't realize that by giving up they are signing themselves up for a lifetime of misery.

Again, I want to emphazise that learning how to socialize took me as much work, and effort, and time, as learning 12 years of school education took. And it was more painful. And I've barely begun on learning about relationships.

The point my rambling post is trying to get to:

My advice is to take it one step at a time - learn how to be good socially first, THEN learn how to be in relationships. You can't just jump from prep to grade 12 and expect to pass, just like you can't just jump from being unable to even socialize properly to being in a relationship.

You can't be in a relationship until you learn how to socialize; criteria involving maintaining and being part of a group of NT friends, or having several NT friends.

Think of a ladder. To get from the bottom of the ladder to the top, you have to climb it rung by rung.

Marriage
---------
Learn how to maintain a long term relationship
---------
Learn the giving and taking and social rules of a relationship
---------
Learn how to enter a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship
---------
Learn the correct way to ask that person out
---------
Learn how to engage and maintain the interest of a particular member of the opposite sex
--------
Learn how to engage the interest of the opposite sex
--------
Flirt with someone
--------
Branch out and meet new people
--------
Become an equal member of a friendship group
--------
Learn enough about social correctness for people to stop bullying you
--------
Making several friends
---------
Making a friend
--------
Maintaining an acquaintance
--------
Having a two way conversation
--------
Greeting people

The bolded one is where I'm up to.

Also, I hope this is not offensive to anyone, I may have emphasized a bit strongly in places and I apologize.

I'm not too sure where I fit on that ladder, I've been somewhere between "Flirt with someone" and "Learn how to enter a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship" for the best part of six years.

Question: How does one appear less creepy and where does that fit in on your ladder?

EDIT: Crap I just realized that was two questions. I've always sucked at math.

Last edited by hester386 on 05 Apr 2009, 6:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Wow, what an informative thread. We aspie guys need to read this follow it. It may not be easy for some aspies to do this though. But I am trying. I don't think my AS is as severe as other members so maybe it is easier for me but it all boils down to trying. I'm in a social skills group and I'm learning a lot.

As for the ladder, I think I'm on this stage:

Become an equal member of a friendship group.

I have many acquaintances at college and a few friends plus no one bullies me anymore. In fact I haven't been bullied for several years now. And I feel like if I were, I could stand up for myself better than I could before.

Well, at least you've climbed a fair way, which is a good achievement in my opinion (this is how I see things).

I find the best way to learn about how to do the relationship stuff is to ask NT friends about it. In all seriousness, ask them exactly what they do and how they do it (even though it might be a bit awkward). And I found that reading a book on body language helped immensely at this point too - because when you're a child most of your communication is verbal, but by the time you're an adult most of the communication is non-verbal (in the case of NT's I mean, I learned this is psychology). Therefore, by the time you're an adult and looking for relationships, you need to actively learn non-verbal communication by either reading about it or asking NT's about it (there's not much point asking aspies, because it's like asking primary school kids how to do algebra - some advanced kids might know bits and pieces, but you'll get a way better understanding from asking a teacher or a high school kid).

From some of the responses I have received in the past I really question the reading comprehension skills of some of the posters here. Therefore it is probably wise to take the defeatist attitude that some just won't understand this. Sometimes you have to pick your battles.

It's very nice that you're trying to be helpful. Anyone on this forum should know how much work socialization is, especially because we tend be be on the very low end of the bell curve in this area.

I've never seen anyone turn the objectives into a ladder before. I find it helpful to see a list of goals.

Even though I'm older than you I'm lower on the list, although I don't think that all of these have to be done in order. If I'm not burned out I can do #1. Same for #2 if I get some help from the other conversationalist. I've even managed #3. #4 has been the place I have been stuck at for years now, and not for lack of effort. However, I have managed to do #6 and I am frequently trying #8.

I've been seeking advice from lots of people, and have been for years, though I tend not to seek it actively from my real-life friends. In most circumstances it would break the comfort zone, which may hurt the friendship.

A few years ago I joined an AS social skills training group. The instructor there told me that I was a good communicator for someone with AS but I still improved dramatically over the course of the year. I'm not sure whether that had more to do with being part of the group or being in college. I went there the following year and had mostly the exact same lessons done again, and didn't bother going a third time.

I guess if there is frustration it's that I believe I am generally acting in a reasonable fashion around my peers, and have been for years when in my childhood and teenage years I could have been a lot more awkward or difficult, but not being able to get dates suggests to me that something about my behaviour is still off and I don't realise how significant it is.

I think that fits on the:

Learn enough about social correctness for people to stop bullying you

rung.

A lot of NT's think people appear creepy because they are not conveying the right social cues. People tend to either bully or make fun of people who haven't surpassed this rung. One of the main social faux pas I've noticed that can cause this is by staring at people too much, and also by talking about "socially inappropriate" topics - such as topics that are too violent, or too sexual, or too explicit in some way. Or perhaps invading peoples "space" too much; such as sending too many emails, following people places, standing too close to people or too far away from people.

It can be any combination of things, without knowing you personally it's hard to tell. The best way to figure it out is to use your logic; if someone calls you "creepy" think about what you were doing immediately before they said this, or think about the times when people have said you're "creepy" and try to think of any actions or things you've said systematically each time. Find relationships between your actions and other peoples negative reactions. Then when you've isolated the offending actions/words/body language, try to stop doing it.

Sometimes people will even be helpful and go something like "it's creepy the way you stare at me all the time". This is great, cause you immediately know what action is at fault and you can fix it straight away.

Yeah, at least you know what the problem is. I think the relationships part is the hardest, because it's the highest up on the ladder and therefore the most complex and abstract and difficult to understand. I probably can't be of a lot of help on advice with actually learning how to be in relationships yet mainly because I still haven't got it right myself; so I'm still in the process of researching it (through logical observation, questioning people, that sort of thing) and learning it.

Thanks. I think it helps to put things into a concrete form. I agree that things probably don't have to be done in that exact order; that was a very rough approximate list I came up with off the top of my head (just to give an idea of the approximate order of things), ideally in time (once I hopefully make it to the top of the ladder) I want to do a whole lot of research and spend time creating a proper more detailed ladder of socialization.

I do think that people will be on different rungs of the ladder regardless of age, because people are at different levels of functioning but also because people have grown up in different environments with different influences. I am quite ahead because my parents trained and drilled the lower rungs of the ladder into me when I was a kid, so I had a head start. So I think even if people are lower functioning, they can still move further up the ladder by treating socializing like an academic subject; reading books on it and using logic and observation to draw relationships between the actions and reactions of NT's.

All good thoughts and yes, you have to keep fighting the good fight with self-improvement - its the only way to go. The ladder bit though is never really symmetric from one person to the next, as you'll have people who just jump huge swaths right to the end and you probably have more than enough people who can easily hold rungs well above marriage (they're there) but can't hold a marriage or even sometimes enter a relationship. The relationship world though is one of those odd places where personal caveats (especially the unchangeable core issue type stuff) seem to have the deepest impact.

At the end of the day I don't think anyone can guarantee that effort will get the literal end-objective that they want but, it'll improve their lives regardless. Even guys who are born into and leave this world without really ever being in a long term relationship have to realize that at some point that they can't let their serendipity get the best of their happiness.

I'm up somewhere between learn to flirt with flirt with someone and enter boyfriend/girlfriend relationship. I still have some trouble with the simpler social interactions but I've gotten much better over the past few years. Right now all I need to do are to develop more coping strategies and learn more about the NT social norms of the modern world.

This is a great, positive topic! Glad to see it here.

*cheers Sunshower* Gold stars, all around!


M.

Please don't take the stuff in this thread too seriously.

As Aspies, you should be suspicious of any "developmental sequence" or hierarchy or anyone who says that you need to do this before you can do that. It just ain't true.

You should also be suspicious of anyone who claims to be able to teach "social skills." Most NTs do it instinctively and don't consciously know the first thing about it. It would make as much sense to say, "I have lungs, therefore I know all about them, therefore you should let me operate on yours." Our methods of learning social skills bear no resemblance to an NT's way of doing them.

Still, tossing ideas around is good if it gets you thinking along different lines.

One thing that might help is stepping outside your culture, either to people significantly older or younger, or people who are foreign born. You might be surprised at how easy they are to get along with. Another setting that might be more tolerant is a class or other situation which is mostly populated by the opposite gender. Not to pick up chicks, but just for the cross-cultural experience, minus the chest-pounding competition. (And don't ruin it by asking everyone in the room for a date.) Join a church choir? (I don't know where that just came from.) Anything to get away from those subtle cultural thingies that you'll never get exactly right.

I've heard people rave about the benefits of acting lessons. I never tried it, but that sounds to me like it should be helpful.

I've said somewhere before, if you really want to study people as a system, study psychology or anthropology. It won't give you a direct answer to any of your questions, but could help you to frame the questions differently. Still, there's a limit to how far logic will take you when dealing with irrational beings.

(PS: I've been married for 20 years. The bottom line is that you'll never make sense of people because they have no sense.)

I would say that's where I'm at right now, which isn't too bad considering my psych history. What helped me was that I wasn't diagnosed til age 31, so I had no choice but to 'grin and bear it' so to speak. I forced myself to go to work, and do some social stuff...even though most of it was hell. Throughout the years, I became desensitized to some of the anxiety, and learned some social skills as well. No, I didn't learn them at the same pace as most NT's do, but, I did learn many things, over time. Now, I can hold my own in just about any situation, even though I may not feel comfortable doing so. Now, for the next step.....