stephani-d asked:
I have a sorta-friend who’s aspergers. My other friends and I try to be understanding about stuff (she wears earplugs so sometimes we have to remind her she’s getting loud) and has a few things she really likes, but she isn’t interested in talking about other stuff than what she likes, and interrupts a lot. I’ve been debating about showing her this blog for a while but I don’t know if that would offend her. I don’t know how to tell her she’s annoying because I’m bad at confrontation stuff.
realsocialskills said:
What would you be trying to do by showing your sorta-friend my blog?
I kind of get the sense that you’re thinking that, maybe if you showed it to her, she’d learn that the things that annoy you are bad and stop doing them. It doesn’t actually work that way, though. You can’t just point someone at instructions that will make them better. Friendship is something you work on together.
The point of friendship is that you figure out ways you like interacting, then do those things together. My blog posts can’t replace that.
If someone’s doing stuff you don’t like in a friendship, you have to work that out with them, either by talking it through or by redrawing the boundaries of the relationship so that it doesn’t cause you intolerable problems.
Some specific stuff: your friend is allowed to only want to talk about certain things. You’re allowed to want to limit how much you talk about those things. But this is a negotiating the boundaries of friendship thing, not a getting your friend to change so you’ll like her more.
Figure out what you like doing together, do that, and draw boundaries around the things you don’t want to do.