I’m 30 and horrible at keeping friends. I don’t know if it’s the unschooling or the autism, but I’m told I come across as hostile when I think I’m being nice.
I know the basics. I make eye contact but not too much, I ask people about themselves and their interests to show I’m interested, I don’t dominate conversations with myself and my own interests. I try to be a nice person people might want to keep around, too— I give money when someone’s in a pinch, I remember birthdays, I help move, et cetera.
Eventually people either people tell me I’m being a dick in ways I never realized, or more likely, they just eventually stop messaging me back.
The one thing I’m sure I struggle with is body language. I’ve read a lot that you need to mirror the other person’s body language, but I don’t know how to do that. Especially since I normally meet people at work and we’re usually pushing big carts around and moving products and I’m just not thinking about my body as something expressive, just practical.
I’m sure I have many more blind spots that I’m not even aware of.
So like… are there classes for this? Some kind of specialized therapy? I don’t really want to try anymore unless I can stop being a dick
I wasn’t directly called a dick, but I get told I “clearly” mean something I didn’t mean a lot. Like once I was complaining that my siblings (all late 20s to early 30s) didn’t work and expected my mom to pay for everything, and a friend came in with “I know you’re just mad at me for being unemployed” when I wasn’t talking to or about him. Another time, I was venting (with permission) and said I was scared I was a bad person, and this friend took it to mean he was a bad judge of character, and even after I apologized he kept talking about what a bad judge of character he is.
I thought it was just this friend projecting his insecurities, but recently I was arguing with another friend and I apologized and said it was my fault for not explaining myself clearly, and he took it to mean I thought he was too stupid to have serious conversations with. He said I look down on him for being disabled and stopped talking to me.
My sister has also gotten mad at me without warning during casual conversations and I have to pry an explanation out of her and it’s always “your tone of voice made it sound like you were picking a fight”.
Also multiple instances where I was repeatedly told my apologies weren’t genuine and I was lying.
So no one’s straight up called me a dick, but I think a person who says or thinks the things I’m communicating would be a dick. Whether I mean to be or not, the person I’m presenting to the world is a dick. I make people feel awful about themselves, and I want to not do that.
Anyway, thanks for the tips. I try to do all those, but now that I think about it, I’m probably bad at the last one. I’ve definitely been yelled at for not shutting up before.
Going to come back to this to reflect in more detail to your original post and to this comment, but wanted to quickly float the idea that perhaps these people view you as particularly sound, so when they lay things on you or are just more emotional or intense in front of you, and you seem unphased - neither rushing to condemn them nor scrambling to reassure - they interpret that as disapproval from someone whom they find sound. And that because they value your judgement & integrity, they get sheepish and awkward in the absence of a strong outward reaction, which in turn you interpret as them thinking ill of you.
Only suggesting this because have seen quite a bit of this between people, and experienced mild versions of both ends of that dynamic.
Not that it helps, if it even resonates, or provides guidance.
I don’t think that’s quite right. I’m a basketcase and they know it. They’re always pretty rightfully annoyed with me for catastrophizing. I also used to try too hard to reassure them— eg, someone would say he feels like a bad person and I’d remind him of the good things he’s done— and they had to explain to me that that’s a dick move.
Idk about all the rest of it, but you might be able to learn to watch your tone. You know, modulate your voice better. Figure out what sounds aggressive and how to catch it, maybe apologize for it if appropriate, then consciously avoid it for a bit.
I think I’ve had a couple friends like you, and while there were a few things to tolerate with them (as I’m sure there were with me as well), the weirdly/slightly aggressive tone they had a bit too often made hanging out with them a little bit worse than it could’ve been.
Still happy to have spent the time I did with them. I’m still hanging out with one of them and he’s still aggressively into some games, TFT now, but he’s chilled out a bit it seems or I just notice it less. It comes back when he gets competitive or drunk.
If you’re being perceived a different way than you intend, I find it’s best to simply apologise, explain that what your intention was and clarify what you mean.
It’s not just you that can mistakenly imply, others can mistakenly infer things too; such is the nature of human to human communication. (Considering we’re just a mess of electrical impluses it’s a miracle we can communicate ideas at all tbh)
Just be yourself, apologise and clarify if it comes across incorrectly, learn from the immediate feedback and I feel critically; don’t be trying to keep to guidelines of how you need to behave in a conversation. Be yourself, be in the moment. If you’re trying to micromanage your behaviour in the moment, people will sense that and it’ll put them off.
Just try to lean towards replies that hear the other person and show them kindness, but don’t overthink it on a day to day
One possibility is that it’s how you phrase things? Everything seems fine here but people tend to write and speak differently, so just throwing out a possibility here.
I used to say essentially “not my fault” a lot as a kid (it was a kind of deflection that I resorted to instead of actually dealing with stuff), and my mom called me out on it once, which caused a huge shift in how i thought about communication from then on. See, sometimes it was my fault, and other times it wasn’t, but that doesn’t really matter a lot in a conversation, so I started kinda taking a mental step back to consider what I was about to say would actually accomplish in the conversation, or how it might be perceived by others, and it became clear to me that I had some other bad conversational habits as well that escalated situations when they didn’t need to.
It might not be easy to detect all of them at once, but just getting into the mindset of thinking about this stuff might help. Hopefully this technique isn’t why I’m anxious these days :P
Edit: Also some subjects are sore as you experienced with your unemployed friend, so having this habit of taking a step back might have helped with realizing that in advance. It’s not always doable of course, you can’t know everything.
Maybe? I feel like I try too hard to be polite sometimes. My last therapist told me I was allowed to ask my friends for better ways to phrase things, but they got mad and said I was putting them on the spot.
Last time I explicitly said, “sorry, that was my fault,” and explained what I did wrong, and my friend still took it as me calling him stupid.
I’m beginning to think it’s just too complex for anyone to explain to me how to be nice
What do you do when you accidentally bring up a sore subject? Last time, I apologized and said I should have realized (I should have), and my friend and I got into a two-day argument about whether it was a sincere apology or not. I finally asked what I did to deserve being accused of lying and he just said “well if I had said that I’d mean it manipulatively, so I assumed you did”. So apologizing in that scenario is taken as manipulative, right?
I mean… I think you did the right thing here. Hard to say without any context, but your friends kinda sound like dicks, like really taking offense at small things that really don’t matter that much.
Sorry, not sure what you should do with this take, just that maybe the problem is not entirely you.
I considered this, but the fact that it’s been two different friends plus my sister made me think I was the one being a dick.
Maybe we’re all dicks
Its certainly harder to explain over text since we can’t hear your tone. Do you put in a lot of effort when you speak ? Does talking come naturally, or do you spend a lot of energy trying to be polite ?
Without knowing exactly what you said its hard to know if this reflects more on your friend than you. Apologizing should be fine, so the issue is either how you apologized or your friend. Also a two day argument is a long argument. Who kept it going? Who would bring it up first?
Edit: I see in one comment that you are autistic. Have you talked to your friends and family about what this means in a conversation ? At some point its on them, honestly.
It definitely takes a lot of energy. Using the right tone, making the correct amount of eye contact, listening to what the other person is saying, and not talking so long to come up with a reply that they get mad at me, feels like multitasking. I really try, though.
I guess we both kept it going. I should have dropped it but I hated leaving the conversation with him thinking I was lying. That’s another problem I know I need to work on.
I’ve talked about autism before, but two of my friends are autistic and the other has a TBI, so they told me it wasn’t really fair for me to expect them to hold my hand and explain everything I was doing wrong, which I think is fair. As for my family, there’s no talking about psych stuff with them.
Either way I’d rather learn social skills than ask everyone I meet to let me be rude since I’m autistic. No one’s going to want to put up with that.
All of these examples across your comments have this in common: People who were feeling guilty about something, and then lashing out at you in anger for allegedly calling them out on the issue. This is a very common coping strategy that people use, and it’s really not your fault at all because they didn’t tell you up front about their feelings. They just want to make it seem that it is your fault to deflect from their own unpleasant feelings.
This is a really hard one to learn to detect if you’re not tuned into people (that is, autistic). Hell, it’s a hard one to detect for everybody. You kind of have to watch for body language which indicates discomfort: Body stiffness, blank affect, disengaging from conversation, flared nostrils, clipped syllables, curt replies. If you see those indicators, change the topic.
This is good advice, thanks!
Unfortunately the worst of it always seems to take place over text, at least I know it’s common now.