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.