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Following on from parts one, two and three, I’m giving an rough outline of the course of my life to date, not necessarily with regards Aspergers directly, but just to give the history of how I’ve got to where I am.

Socialising

At the end of part two I mentioned that I started to spend most of my weekends in Manchester with my friend Emma. She was very sociable and would have friends over for socials every weekend, so I started to learn how to socialise. I realised that I am a slow burn. It takes me a while to get to know people, but once I know them I can be very sociable, but I have to be comfortable with them. I also quickly came to learn that if Emma wasn’t there, then I would really struggle making conversation with people that I could easily talk to when she was there.

It’s the same today. I can be sociable with Maria’s friends when she is present, but if I picked them up to bring back to our house, or when taking them home, I would always feel very uncomfortable making conversation. I need the comfort blanket of knowing that there is someone there to bail me out if needed.

Moving To Manchester

At the start of 2001, Emma asked me to take her car to the local car wash. Enroute we noticed that the show house had been opened on a new Barrat Homes development, so we stopped and went for a mooch. I left an hour later having bought a new home that I didn’t realise I needed. The sales rep was clearly very good at her job. To date it’s still the biggest impulse buy of my life.

On the day that I took ownership of the house we found out that my mum had cancer for the third time in 9 years, and this time it was terminal. This kind of threw things up into the air a bit. I know that sounds a bit glib and coldhearted, but I’ll write in a later post about how I coped with that.

My mum was severely ill; she could not keep food down due to the nature of the cancer, so she was hospitalised and then moved to a hospice. She was in for 17 weeks before she eventually passed away on 22nd August 2001. So I delayed moving into my house in Manchester and stayed at the home I’d shared with my mum so that I could easily visit her, which I did every day.

As I needed to furnish my house in Manchester I asked the sales rep if she would have a key and let deliveries in for me, which she agreed to do. Her name was Maria, and she was a vision of beauty. To be honest one of the reasons why she’d managed to sell me a house that I didn’t know I was looking for was because I instantly fancied her. Over the course of the months that she was helping me out we struck up a friendship, and then one day she told me that she was moving sites. I was gutted.

I didn’t see her again until a few days after my mum passed away when I visited her new site. It was on this day that she told me that she was pregnant. It had never dawned on me to ask her if she was single, so my heart sank, but it turned out that she had been engaged, but had split up recently.

Our friendship developed slowly and I first invited her over a few weeks before her daughter was born. To this day she still points out to me that you should let the heavily pregnant woman sleep in the double bed and you take the single in the spare room, but hey I’m Aspie, and I don’t know what it’s like to be pregnant.

I finally found the courage to ask her out on a proper date in the following April. We dated but as with my previous relationships it only lasted for a few months before things went wrong. As before it seemed to be down to my behaviour, this time my anxiety rather than lack of social skills. We remained friends and they came to stay with me every weekend for the next 10 years. It was as though we were a family, but we were not in a relationship. We’d holiday together, and do all the things that couples with young kids do, but there was no romantic or sexual connection.

Then one day she told me that she had met someone. My world fell apart instantly. I’d been in love with her for years, but had never dared to tell her. I’d taken her to Paris to fly on Concorde for my 30th birthday in 2003 and told her that weekend that I loved her, and she didn’t speak to me for over a month. So I feared that if I told her again that she’d never see me again. I’d lose my weekend happy families routine, and I’d be alone.

I would constantly tell myself that I’d never find anyone else and I’d be eternally lonely. I know that is supposed to be what we Aspie’s crave, but it isn’t. It really isn’t. Every one wants to be with somebody in some capacity, it’s just that the anxieties involved in that make if very hard for someone with ASD.

As I had nothing to lose I sat down and a wrote her a letter telling her exactly how I felt, which I sent through the post. She called me and told me that she felt the same. Not one to do anything by halves, and fearing that she might change her mind, I suggested that I move in straight away, which I did.

In retrospect that was probably a mistake, but I’ll leave that for the next part.

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After I passed my A-Levels I departed for Salford University to read Geography. I hated my first year. I was in halls of residence and I didn’t make any friends. I actually went to Uni with a friend that I’d been to both primary school and high school with, and another friend who I’d been to just high school with. So I hung around with them all the time, which I realise in retrospect was an easy way to avoid having to make new friends.

But they eventually got themselves girlfriends and I would just sit in my room in the halls of residence, playing games on my PC. It was rather a lonely existence, but it was easier than trying to break into social groups that were now well developed.

I also only spent one weekend in Manchester over the entire education year. Because I was still heavily involved in the Air Cadets I would go home at weekends to fly, glide and shoot. This was another act of avoidance. So I left university after 5 years having not socialised once.

Another reason for coming home each weekend is that I’d somehow managed to get myself my first girlfriend, who was also in the Air Cadets. I didn’t ask her out, I didn’t have the guts, but fortunately one night during a game of spin the bottle, she revealed to the room that she fancied me. That only lasted for a few months though, and the relationship developed into friendship. She’s still my best friend to this day.

I was fortunate enough to be sponsored by Siemens whilst at Uni and walked straight into a job with them after university in the IT department of their factory in Cheshire as a software developer. It was a small team of 5 people, and the work clearly suited the logical mind of an Aspie. I really enjoyed the work and would put in 12 hours days, 7 days weekly. I still do 12 hour days, but not on weekends!

Whilst working there I did start to learn to socialise because lots of social events were organised by the social committee, and most of the people there were also rather geeky being electronic engineers, so I was on the same wavelength and found that I had interests in common.

The work was quite autonomous and I started to play around with web development without my boss knowing. I knocked up a web site on my lunch breaks, just for the sake of self learning, that would allow our customers to query our databases to find out where in the world their orders were. The boss was impressed.

At this point in my life I decided that I wanted a girlfriend but hadn’t a clue about how to find one. It was 1998 and the World Wide Web was in its infancy; there was no Plenty of Fish, or Match.com back then.

So I went around the factory jokingly asking colleagues if they had any buxom blonde single friends (completely not my type so I don’t know why I asked that) and evantually one said that yes he did. I was set up on a blind date with Emma, and after a 6 hour (she likes to talk!) conversation somehow found the confidence to meet her a few days later. This was completely out of my comfortzone, but I knew that I had to push myself.

The date was a little out of the ordinary; we were joined by a pole dancer and one of the Manchester Mafia for a few minutes, but we hit it off and started to date. However, after a few months she got a few of her friends and her mum over to meet me, and that’s when the wheels came off. I sat at the table like a fish out of water. I barely spoke that night, and that was off-putting to Emma. She’s very sociable.

We remained friends though, and I’d stay with her most weekends and over time became comfortable with her friends and started to develop social skills. Emma told me the secret to doing that is to talk about them and not yourself. This flies completely in the face of what comes naturally to an Aspie, but it’s something that I do try to remember, but often fail with, to this day.

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Is it? How do you know that? It’s very presumptuous of you. I could be having the worst time ever, and usually am.

“Good Morning” has to be the most pointless piece of small talk going. The more cheerfully said, the more irritating it is. I don’t get why Neurotypicals feel the need to speak just for the sake of speaking. One person says “Good Morning” and the recipient repeats “Good Morning”. What purpose does that serve?

It’s even worse when a stranger says it to you as you pass them.

Clearly people say it just because they feel obligated to say it, that it’s the polite thing to do. I just like to keep myself to myself, and attract no attention, yet here people are stressing me out by making me engage in conversation, if that’s what you can call two words.

Sometimes they add “How are you?” to the end of the “Good Morning”. I know, and you know, that they don’t actually want to know how you are, so again, why feign interest?

If I’m feeling particularly grouchy, I’ll sometimes stop and start a conversation with the greetee if they ask how I am, and tell them of all my problems. That tends to stop them from ever saying it to me again.

I once worked with a girl who every morning would bounce into the office full of life at 8am. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone more happy clappy than Gemma. She would almost sing “Good Morning” before immediately launching into 101 questions. “Did you have a good weekend?”, “What did you do last night”, “Did you see such and such on the TV?”.

God she did my head in. Eventually I had to tell her that I didn’t do conversation until 9am just to stop the endless onslaught. I’ve no idea how she ended up being a good friend, when I took that attitude with her, but she did.

The last relationship I was in was a long distance one, so we relied on messaging and phone calls. She always expected the first message of the day to be “Good Morning” and if it wasn’t would grumble. So most days I remembered to type it out, but I really didn’t see the point. I’d rather have launched straight into conversation. It’s such a pointless filler.

Yes I know that all of the above makes me appear to be rude, but honestly, it really stresses me out when people engage me in this pleasantry. I don’t know why, but it just does. The stress starts when I’m walking towards someone, knowing that they are likely to say it. So I will sometimes divert my path, or put my phone to my ear as though on a call, just to avoid a simple “Good morning”.