Shoot, a bunch of these sub-questions got answered in the previous question.3. What differences in relationships do you experience?
Their examples include: 3a) How well have you managed relationships, particularly friendships, throughout your lifetime (as a child, teen, and currently)? 3b) Initiating conversations 3c) Taking things literally 3d) Conversational timing 3e) Reduced sharing of interests or emotions 3f) Interrupting 3g) Not liking to be touched 3h) Challenges with small talk 3i) Developing and maintaining friends or relationships 3j) Difficulty adjusting behaviour to social contexts 3k) Preferring solitary activity
3a) I think I've managed my relationships pretty well, but it's required a lot of very intensive energy and active management to review all the expected parts of relationships, figure out what's a good fit for me and retain those, jettison the parts that don't fit, and then find people who are a good match for what I want. I don't have many continuous enduring friendships though, they're generally full of long spaces without contact.
My romantic relationships don't look remotely like the relationships people from my culture have, to the point that they are not legally or socially acknowledged in most to many cases. I have multiple partners, I prefer a great deal of autonomy over what I do with my body and living space and finances, I don't tend to engage in standard relationship activities.
I manage any emotionally intimate relationships (close friends or romantic partners) very differently from most dominant culture people. I require clarity, and at this point in my life that means clarity either through verbal agreement or several rounds of repetitive behaviour, on which of the many different aspects of relationship I’ll be engaging in with folks (like, how often do we communicate, what method do we use to communicate, what topics are ok, who initiates and how do we stop initiating, will there be physical contact, will there be sex, what happens in edge cases, what happens when there’s strong emotion, how long-lasting will the connection be). In general I assume that any interaction, even a friendly interaction, is not “part of a friendship” unless a pattern of behaviour or verbal agreement has been established.
Because I'm not able to follow through on periodic or weekly commitments due to demand avoidance, I manage friendships through attending activities or group events where I'm not required to attend on a regular schedule (no demand to attend) and through situations where I'm in contact with people incidentally (volunteering, sometimes work).
As I child I played with the other weird kids. We were all weird together, so there was no one normal way to exist, which made a comfortable environment for me.
As a teen I hung out with the other weird kids. Friends were friends because of proximity, not really because of agreements.
3b) I have a lot of friends who are prone to feeling rejected if they need to initiate conversations. With those friends I’ll deliberately reach out to start conversations. These are folks I’ve known a long time, and I do this as a service to the friendship sometimes. I think sometimes these friendships are an ease to my demand avoidance: if someone considers that I've already rejected them because of their own psychological stuff, there's no demand to keep in contact, so I can keep in contact without that pressure. If someone expects me to initiate conversations regularly I have a lot more trouble.
I'm comfortable initiating conversations with friends if I feel they're interested or not busy, though I'm not great at the typical pleasantries before diving into conversation. One of the tools I use to manage my social relationships is to select friends who are compatible with my conversation style though, so they're not offended by how I initiate.
When I can't carefully select the people I'm relating with, such as at work, I have more trouble initiating conversation because I can't think of any overlapping areas of interest to discuss.
With new contacts I try to keep the number of conversational intitiations symmetrical, so if they start one then I’ll start one a little later. I don’t want to initiate too much or too little and this rule of thumb helps that; it also helps me notice how often they initiate and helps me create expectations around frequency of contact.
3c) I don't take sarcasm literally, but I do struggle with wanting the literal meaning of words to line up with a situation, especially with rules. Currently at work I'm struggling significantly with work hours, where I was told to "show up on time, don't be late, and you can't move your lunch hour or come in early and leave early" but people do that sort of thing all the time. When I asked about it I was told "you can't do it, but you can a little, but not much" and I could tell they were trying hard to unpack and provide the actual literal meaning of the hours for me but they were unable to do so. I would be much more comfortable if they could give me literal descriptions of what's ok, for instance "you can move your lunch hour by up to an hour once every two weeks, and don't be more than a total of twenty minutes late across a two week period" or some other metrics. Instead I want to take their "always be exactly on time" literally and I know I'm not supposed to, but don't know how to extrapolate the true meaning.
3d) I'm not sure what's meant my conversational timing; I prefer overlapping speech patterns where sometimes both people are talking at once. Talking over someone to agree or add nuance in these situations is not meant to indicate they should stop talking and let me talk, but instead is an encouragement for them to keep talking and a signal that I'm interested. I think this is cultural, though, from some of my Jewish background. It's not considered polite in many of my circles though and sometimes I just don't talk because I don't want people to feel like my overlapping style means I'm not interested (quite the opposite!)
In a group of many people I have trouble knowing when to speak up, and often feel like I don't know how to slide my contribution in. I also have trouble processing verbal speech, and so in a group verbal situation I often don't think of something to say until much later, when I'm perusing the extensive notes I need to take in order to both process and remember verbal situations.
3e) I don't understand what is meant by "reduced sharing of interests or emotions". I don't have many interests in common with people, or at least I don't approach my interests in a common way - for instance, I garden, but I garden to experiment with genetic or growing methodologies and not to grow a large pretty cabbage or rose. Sometimes I find people who are equally interested in something similar to an interest of mine and we have a very enjoyable time talking about it. Because I do not have a typical life plan, I do not talk about or have interest in: how much I hate my husband, the kids and their hockey games, my upcoming wedding, my friends' upcoming weddings, how trapped I feel in my marriage, how bad I feel now that my kids are grown up, and drinking. That feels like a significant reduced sharing of interests at my current workplace, though it hasn't in other, more carefully selected workplaces.
People do not care what my emotions are, and they do not approve when they know, so I do not share them widely with people except close friends. I have no way of knowing whether other people share their emotions with me more than they do with other people, because I have no way of figuring out their baseline.
3f) (see conversational timing)
3g) Touching, like eye contact, is a tremendous, deep, and intense source of communication for me. Because it conveys so much information I only like to be touched by people I trust; the incoming volume of information means I can't process much else at the same time so I'm vulnerable to overwhelm and won't act normal, and the person I'm touching will know I react and interact differently than normal people. I struggle deeply with monogamous frameworks that indicate certain kinds of touch are ok and others are not. I operate from a consent-based touch framework, but when I’m trying to communicate or receive something by touch I don’t have the additional bandwidth to assess if it’s an acceptable monogamous type of touch or not or to remember other social rules around it other than what the person there with me wants to or is able to engage in.
3h) I learned small-talk when I worked in offices tending plants. I went into roughly a hundred personal office spaces a day, and at first I’d repeat what the person in the previous office had said to the person in the next office. Over time I learned the patterns of small-talk, what was acceptable and what wasn’t, and learned to see it as a signalling process by which people understood whether the other person was safe and interested in speaking more deeply or not. This was a deliberate skill I picked up, though it’s atrophied through disuse lately, and did not come naturally to me.
3i) Developing and maintaining friendships and relationships is tricky for me, because I'm not a good fit with most people in dominant culture. There are very few people I can befriend in a way where I can sharing my feelings and interests comfortably, with whom I can be mutually honest, and who I'm interested in knowing about their lives. I have developed the excellent tool of unmasking/speaking clearly about my interests, desires in interpersonal relationships, and my interest in other people (if I have interest there); this screens people because folks who are uninterested in me quickly wander away, while folks who are interested stay and know I'm interested because I have explicitly said so. So I might say "let's go home and take our clothes off" or "let's go home and snuggle" to someone when I am hanging out with someone and realize I'd like to share touch with them. This is clear, unambiguous, and I used to think it left more space for consent than just trying to hint about going somewhere more comfortable and then tugging around the edge of their shirt or something when we get there. The internet, and internet dating sites, are exceptionally good for clear communication about what I'd like in any kind of relationship, and they allow people who like my candour to opt in.
I really struggle with maintaining friendships. In a lot of ways it seems like I re-initiate friendships with the same people, with breaks in between, rather than "maintianing" them per se. When I'm speaking with someone regularly, their expectation that I'll continue to speak with them becomes a demand, and it becomes more and more difficult and uncomfortable to reach out. I mentioned some strategies above (being friends with people who don't believe I'll continue to be their friend) but as my friends do personal work and develop self-confidence that solution fails, as I still really like those people and want to be close with them but the sense of demand returns.
Maintaining internet friendships, with the ability for asynchronous communication, really helps reduce demands. So does a spontaneous in-person model where certain activities (say, dinner) can be but do not have to be shared on any given day.
Another workaround is to interact with people intensely for a period of time (a couple weeks to several months or even a year) and then have a long period of downtime without much contact, and then to have another period of intensity. I’ve structured my relationship style, solo polyamory, to accommodate this and most of my longstanding friends accept this style of relating from me.
3j) I do not like adjusting my behaviour to social contexts. It feels awkward, deceitful, and invisibilizing. I do it because I have to, and as little as possible.
3k) I like having conversations, as an activity and in alignment with my special interest of learning about people. My other activities are almost entirely solo. I would not enjoy my biggest activity, gardening, with someone else in a collaborative way. I do like showing people the results of my activities, so if someone comes to the farm I’ll take them on chores and show them around, but that’s not the same as collaboratively engaging in the process of making or doing things. I guess generally I don’t mind the role of instructor or learner, but true collaboration is rare and difficult for me for activities? I have one partner with whom I've worked hard to develop activity partnerships and we can now enjoy things like building a shed or cutting down mushroom logs together, but it took maybe four years of friction and active work to get to the point of being comfortable.
It's also tremendously difficult for me to do activities with someone else because of the way my demand avoidance functions. I can do activities solo because I can tell myself I'm getting up to do one thing and actually do something completely different, so I'll get up from the couch to plant bulbs but will actually rototill the garden instead. Doing an activity with another person precludes this; there's so much pressure from planning to do something in advance, then getting together to do it, that I can't actually do the thing at all in the moment. So even if I know people who share interests and we can get aligned on how something would work, someone else's presence almost entirely prevents me doing my activities.
I've found some work-arounds for this: when people come to visit I create a "menu" of activities or projects and we can choose spontaneously from them in the moment, then I can either "teach them how to do it" or "learn how they do it" instead of "doing the thing together" and that seems to help my demand avoidance, because I'm not actually doing the activity. But I still spend a lot more time than I'd like sitting with someone, maybe wanting to experiment with doing an activity with them, but unable to do so even if they suggest it.
I do like spending a lot of time alone or especially in parallel play with trusted people.
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