Aspie friendships
Here are two pretty revealing questions about friendships:
- Do you prefer to have friends of the opposite gender?
- Are friends of the same gender important to you?
One would expect these to be opposites, and they are. Their linkage to Aspie and/or neurotypical scores seems less obvious. Without deeper knowledge about this, it would be hard to believe any of them are relevant to being Aspie or neurotypical. The fact is that 1 is related to Aspie score and 2 is related to neurotypical score.
The traits related to a preference to have friends of the same gender are in the neurotypical compulsion group, and especially Do you prefer the company of those of the same generation as yourself? So, neurotypicals seems to have a preference to socialize in same-age groups and primarily with people of the same gender when it comes to friendships and with the opposite gender for relationships. This is hardly news as these traits cannot be missed in society.
The question about a preference to have friends of the opposite gender has different relations. It is related to:
- Have you experienced stronger than normal attachments to certain people?
- Do you tend to lean towards your partner when you are at a restaurant or party?
- Do you tend to become obsessed with a potential partner and cannot let go of him/her?
These are the partner-obsession traits previously analysed in Aspie relationships. These traits group in the environmental group and in the Aspie communication group. They are related to environmental traits like depression because they give big problems in a society that think friendships are between peers of the same gender. The relation to Aspie communication is probably the natural connection.
These results have implications about how the natural social environment of Aspies work. If it is not based on same-gender, age-matched friendships, how does it work? A good guess might be that friendships does not even exist in the natural Aspie environment. What does exist is group-bonding, and the bonds primarily seem to exist between people of the opposite gender. A good guess would also be that what looks like opposite gender friendships naturally develop into relationships over time. This is why this trait is related to relationship questions. The previous finding that being in love in more than one person at the time is an Aspie relationship-type-of-trait fits nicely into the picture, because this indeed indicates a group-bonded social context rather than a monogamous, male-female social context.
Other indicative traits are these:
- Do you prefer to only meet people you know, one-on-one, or in small, familiar groups?
- Do you feel uncomfortable with strangers?
The above traits also indicate a preference for being with the same people all the time, and being reluctant to socialize with strangers. However, they do not point in the direction of a single male-female social context which exist in other primate species. These traits taken together point to a closed group social environment with no pair-bonding within.
As with the relationship traits, the correlation with Aspie score is weak, and thus this way of functioning cannot be generalized to the whole group.
April 6th, 2010 13:16
Interesting.