This is a pretty safe one: Aspies don’t like small talk.
In online dating, if a person goes straight to very intimate, personal, deeply philosophical subjects in the first chat message – suspect the person is on the spectrum.
With the brain structured this way, it will always want to dive deep instantly. As related to the hyper-focus, Aspies have no patience for lingering on random shallow gossip or weather comments on end.
If you meet the Aspie person at a party, they will reveal more personal details about themselves to you than you might want to know. And they will be just as curious to know everything about you and your opinions and views and secrets.
While this comes from the no-nonsense, fact-focused, naive place of mere interest, the socially coded message to the other may be wildly different. In the best case, the other person might be flattered by all the attention and interest at first – especially if the Aspie is attractive to them.
However, the more common result of this inability to small talk, or the long term one, will be “you are weird”, “you are too much“, “you are invading my space”, “you are crossing my boundaries”.
Again, the behavior might often feel so uncomfortable and uncanny to the other, that they can’t even name it before just abandoning the Aspie and never coming back to them.
Once again, just like in the case of straight talk, this is a frequent source of social isolation and stigma for the Aspie.
The long-term results for the Aspie can be:
- Fake it: engineer your social interactions (especially in typical small talk situations) to the point where your true self is effectively annihilated. This can be useful, but won’t be healthy if you can’t find environments to relax and actually be yourself.
- Avoid it: many Aspies simply avoid or even stop getting into said social situations. This can be fine if there is still enough inspiring input in their normal everyday life (like having children or a dog for example), but might inevitably end up in loneliness, especially as age progresses.
- Embrace it: try to make it part of your personality, be explicit about it. Try to weave explanatory comments into your “deep talk” so the other has a chance to interpret your behavior correctly. This might be a difficult balancing act. It might also become more easily implemented as general neurodiversity awareness grows in society.
Meanwhile, an awareness for this trait can greatly enhance a relationship between Aspies: they can go into hyper-mode, drill deep, and explicitly tone it down when it becomes too much.