Relationships

Note: I’ve elected to start with discussing some aspects of the criteria for diagnosis in the DSM-5, out of convenience, before branching out to less medicalized/deficit-based facets of the conversation. Please don’t take this to mean that I think the DSM criteria are the most accurate or complete explanation of the autistic experience, nor is this a complete discussion of those criteria.

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Criterion A-3 of the DSM criteria for autism spectrum disorder refers to “deficits in developing, maintaining, and understanding relationships.”

When the psychiatrist asked me if I had friends, I explained that I had one friend I talked to semi-regularly and a handful of other friends that I didn’t really see or talk to very often.

“So, acquaintances?” she asked.

“No,” I insisted, “they’re my friends. When we do talk it’s about important stuff, not just small talk.”

But I wasn’t sure.

I’ve never been very sure about friends. Not since grade 1, when my “best friend”¹ between, well, birth and age 5, and I started going to different schools and stopped seeing each other regularly. She made new friends. She had a new best friend, as I learned when I went to her birthday party. I didn’t. I thought we were still best friends, in spite of not playing together anymore.

I didn’t have another “best friend” until grade 6. She stopped speaking to me a few years later (see our song “Come Around”) and I never did find out why.

I hung out (sometimes) with various groups in high school, but mostly I was either by myself or in choir practice. I did spend a lot of time chatting with people online. I still tentatively consider a few of them friends, even if we’ve rarely or never met in person and don’t talk much.

I say tentatively because I learned to stop calling people “friend” until they told me we were friends. Even with that clarification from them, I often still wonder. How close are we actually?

What is a friend? Who is my friend? Who counts? Friendship seems like an enormously complicated concept to me.

I keep coming back to this: I have a very hard time starting conversations with people. My instinct is to leap in with the reason I’m contacting them, but I’m aware that they likely have their own things going on, and I’m never sure whether or not I’m supposed to “small talk” with them first. The people I talk to most are the ones where the conversation feels permanent. I can leap in, because I know they’d just tell me if something was going on.

There are painfully few of those. So, I end up with friends that I never talk to. And I wonder if they still think we’re engaged in “friendship.” Or if they’ve moved on, just like my childhood friends.

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¹ Our mothers being close led to a great many playdates and sleepovers. It wasn’t until a lot of years had passed that I understood the connection between this and our friendship.

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1. AUTISM IN MY LIFE
2. SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL RECIPROCITY
3. NONVERBAL COMMUNICATIVE BEHAVIOURS
4. RELATIONSHIPS ← you are here!