 Good afternoon Asperger's Legion. Welcome back to another video with Mr Thomas Henley. Always from the Asperger's Growth channel. Probably sick of that intro so I'm going to change it up. Sup homies. Today we're going to be talking about the bane of the autistic experience. The bane of Batman Arkham Asylum. No, the bane of our life and that just happens to be social interaction. Oh god no. I dread it. The interpersonal relationships. They're also complicated and I know, I understand. But let's take a moment. Let's talk about relationship categories. Input GIF of SpongeBob. There, you can do it. Go set your up. This is something that I have pondered over for a long time. I feel like a lot of autistic people out there could be you, could be your friend, could be your family. We struggle. We struggle a lot with knowing what to say, what to do, how much of a bond to create, how much to ask for someone's attention, to spend time with you. It's going to be a very confusing dilemma because everybody is different and everybody has different rules. But today I'm going to give you a little bit and just a tiny bit of advice on how to sort out those categories. Get it clear in your mind. So if you want to hear something along those lines, be worth your while to stick around. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Welcome. I hope you guys are doing good. I'm doing all right today. Pretty good. Pretty fine. Pretty flash. The reason why I'm making this video is because, you know, being on the internet, I get a few people who message me and want to talk and develop a relationship with me in some formal sense. And sometimes, I mean, to be honest, quite a lot of the time, autistic people tend to be a little bit too personal with people that they don't know very well. And it's not a bash. I think it's very admirable that you value someone's time and you want to spend time with them. It's just a lot of the time, time, time. This can be a little bit too intensive. I have been in this boat, been in these shoes where I've tried to get someone's attention, someone I liked, or as I met them somewhere, I thought they were great. They were like my perfect friend. And I just scared them off. And this happened quite a lot. I just was too needy with my attention. And they just didn't find joy in talking to me anymore. Which is a sad story, I know. Play the world's smallest violin for old Tommy Boy. I'm going to split the video into three sections. Actually, four. Let's go for four sections. Already going back on his plans. Improv, comedic improv. I'm going to split it into acquaintances, loose friends, good friends, and relationships. I'm going to split them up into those four categories. I'm going to give you an idea of what they feel like and when they usually happen, the kind of time frame that you can expect, what to do in each section to make friends with somebody or to date somebody. Which is, there's another video on that. I'm not going to get into that because we want to make it short and concise that fits into YouTube's guidelines. So, you've come out of your little shady little grief hole, and that's horrible, I'm sorry. You've come out of your house for the first time in weeks and days and months, and you have decided to go to a social event, whether it be for sport, whether it's be attending your friend's party, or go into the club. I don't know if autistic people like the club. And you have found somebody, somebody nice, somebody that fits your criteria for a good friend. You may have exchanged numbers, or Facebooks, or any other sort of social medias, and you want to be friends with them. How do we do this? The best way to approach this sort of initial relationship, this sort of acquaintance status, is to think of them more like a work colleague. You know, they, you work with them through the week, and then sometimes, you know, on the off chance, you meet up with them, chill out. If there is a mutual friend that you both know, and they've got something on, then you go to that and you meet them again, and you make friends with them. That's the kind of attitude that you want to have towards people that you just met, no matter how much you like them, or how much they like you. This means taking a little bit of a step back, focusing on your day-to-day life, setting goals, sorting yourself out, focusing on you, rather than the other person. It can be very easy to get excited and want to spend all your time with this person, but to be honest, you don't know them as much as you would like to believe, and the whole friendship and relationship process is a very slow thing, and it's very sometimes tedious for autistic people. It's a truth. It is the truth. If you want an actual numerical value on how often to text someone, a good indicator is once every two weeks. Once every week, if they are very receptive to your communication, maybe even just like tag them in one thing, but don't make it persistent and ungiving. You need to have a life outside of talking to them, and they need to feel that as well, even if you don't, which is difficult. A couple of other suggestions is make sure that you don't get too heavy into things initially. If you start off by sharing all your innermost secrets and desires, and you ask a lot of probing questions on the initial messages, that's going to come off as a little bit creepy, and a little bit too intrusive, so just scale it up, see how they're talking to you, try and match that. Now and again, put a bit more meaning into things, and develop the conversation further. They don't seem like they're reciprocating that a lot. Stop. Go find someone else, someone else to be friends with. Once you've met with someone, let's say about three, four, five, six times, and you start to have a good good sort of communicating relationship, you start to talk to them. If you go into an event with them, then you'll chat to them a lot, and they seem like they want to talk to you as well. If they start initiating conversations with you, then you have gone into the sort of loose friends category, which is number two. The best way to think about a loose friends category is you can talk to them, you can send them a message, you can tag them in a little bit more than you usually would. You will send them messages, around about every week or something, not persistently. You have to sort of feel it out and not be too sort of rigid in your patterns, which I know is difficult. Try and be random. So you're meeting up with them, maybe one to one, possibly. Going out for a coffee or something once every averagely around about every three weeks for most people if you're an adult, maybe a bit less if you're a kid, and you've got more free time on your hands. But for most of us, it will be a very fleeting sort of contact with somebody. This is pretty much how you want to be for a long time. It's a very difficult thing to do, because if you like the person and you want to spend time with them, it can be difficult not to get excited that you've moved on in the relationship and you go all heads, head first into it and dive into the pool of interaction. You may want to voice chat, video call, depending on where they are, if they're a little bit closer. Now and again, when I say now and again, you know, once every one or two weeks, ask them if they want to go out and do something. If you are thinking more in the sort of dating terms, then consider going for a drink, going for a coffee, doing something fun, going trampolining, or saying trampoling because I like it, but you can do that. But if you feel more like it's friend, you can sort something out. You can ask your friends about, see what they're doing. If there's an event, going on sports events, something that you share in common with that person, go to that, just go chill and have fun and be relaxed as hard as that is. I know. You can never relax under the strain of the social interaction sphere. So, you're loose friends. You sort of chill out with each other now and again. If at any point you feel like they want to talk to you a bit more, or you feel like you've got a bit of chemistry going, you can go either, you can go either of two paths. You can date them if you find them attractive, ask them to go for a drink, or you can continue to be friends with them. But one of the most important things to realise about the change from being loose friends to good friends is that it has to be a mutual thing. It can't be forced. Any of these steps can't be forced, but particularly this one. If you are messaging them more than they're messaging you, they probably want to stay friends. But they're not putting in the efforts on their part enough for you to be good friends. You could become good friends, but it would mean a lot of you trying to convince them to do something with you, getting shut down a lot, and being a lot more one-sided, which is not something that you want in a friendship. If they are reciprocating a lot, but you find that they want to call and they invite you to things, you want to do stuff, go along to it. Go along and interact with them. Good friends can take a long time to sort of build. You know, for me, it takes maybe like two or three years to be honest. It depends on the person. If you feel, if you're having fun, they're having fun, you can chill more together. But if at any point, you find like you're feeling like you're forcing either of the dating or friendship stages, going into good friends, you need to take a step back, you need to pace yourself, not get too overly excited. Just relax, go about your daily life. And if you find yourself in an having an opportunity to spend time with them, go spend time with them. I think we as autistic people tend to be a lot more picky with our friends, which means that when we find someone that we like and that fits our criteria of someone that we like, we tend to just rush head forwards towards it and don't think about how the other person feels about us. It can be quite a horrible and bad thing to experience. And you know what, is if you have some loose friends, if you're putting in the effort on your part, they're not putting it in on the other part, maybe you're just better as loose friends. And then, you know, you're not that much compatible that you can spend continual amounts of time with somebody on a regular basis. Just the way that human connection works. As horrible as it is. As damning. I hope this video hasn't been too overly complex or underly complex. I'm trying my best to set out these barriers and these little categories that you can put people into to sort of give you an idea of how to interact and how to think about that relationship. Because you know, if you do find someone that's good friend potential and you rush it too quickly, you're going to quell that instantly. It's going to, you're going to ruin it. People don't want to feel pressured to spend time with somebody. It's got to be something that both people find fun or else it's just you being annoying or the other person being annoying. So that's why I made this video. And I hope it has helped just a little bit. And if it has, and if you do find that it has helped a little bit, why not rewatch it? Rewatch it. Take some notes down. Think about the people in your life. Put them into some categories as robotic and cold logic type as it sounds. That makes sense. Just do it. It makes things a lot more easier once we can really understand something from a more black and white standpoint because you know, humans are not black and white autistic people and we're cool. Go get those relationship goals, those friendship goals. So that's what you deserve, my viewers. And if you like the video make sure to like it because in this culture for some reason, some videos don't get put up. And for a lot of reasons I don't know why. But if you like it or you comment and you subscribe then more people will see my videos and more people will be helped by me and all my glorious narcissism. Are you confused? Are you tired? Do you feel like you're not getting anywhere in the realms of social, socialation, socializing? Maybe you should consider putting people into categories like a robotic robot doing all these logical calculations, thinking in black and white terms and possibly you may feel a little bit better. Just don't tell anybody about it. It's a bit strange for most people, but not for me. You can tell me about it. Hope you had a good time watching this video. I love you guys. You guys in my world. You've helped me so much in my journey to media glory. We've got a long way to go. Keep on pushing. See you later.