Loving Differently: Navigating Relationships as an Autistic Person

Hey besties! 

Quote of the day: “Speak to yourself like someone you love.”

No matter how you feel about yourself, imagine you are speaking to someone you genuinely love when you speak to yourself.

Hey… can we talk about something a little messy? Not messy in a dramatic way—just the kind that sits quietly in your chest and shows up at 2am when you are replaying conversations from three years ago.

I want to talk about friendships. And relationships. And what it is like trying to hold onto them when your brain works a little differently. Because honestly, it can feel like you are always the one holding things just a bit too tightly… or not tightly enough.

If you are autistic, you might know this feeling: you care deeply. Like, intensely, fiercely. You remember the smallest details about people, the snack they mentioned once, the thing they said they were nervous about, the exact way their voice sounded when they were upset. But expressing that care? That is where things get complicated. Sometimes you go quiet because your brain freezes. Sometimes you say too much because you are trying to not go quiet. Sometimes you think everything is fine, and then suddenly it is not, and you have no idea what changed. It is like everyone else got a handbook on how to keep relationships, and yours just… did not arrive.

And losing friendships is not just a one-time heartbreak. It can become a pattern, and patterns hurt differently. It is not just this person leaving. It is the quiet voice in your head going, “See? It is happening again.” So, you start trying to figure it out like it is a puzzle. Did I talk too much? Did I not talk enough? Did I miss a hint? Was I too intense? Not attentive enough? Too honest? Not honest enough? And the hardest part is that a lot of the time, you do not get answers. People drift, or they ghost, or they say something vague like “we just grew apart,” and you are left standing there trying to trace back where things stopped matching.

So, you try harder. You study conversations. You rehearse texts. You analyse tone. You double-check everything. You become hyper-aware. And it is exhausting, because friendships are not supposed to feel like a constant performance, but sometimes it feels like if you do not perform, you will lose them. And even when you try your best—sometimes you still lose them anyway.

There is also this quiet kind of grief that no one really talks about. People understand breakups, the dramatic endings, the clear sense of something being over. But friendship loss is softer and somehow heavier at the same time. There is no clear ending most of the time, no closure, no script for how to process it. Just an unanswered message, or a conversation that slowly fades, or a shift you can feel but cannot explain. And you carry it, all of them, every person who used to be part of your world.

But then, every so often, maybe not often, maybe not easily, you meet someone different. The kind of friend where you do not feel like you are decoding a language you were never taught. They do not get confused by your silences. They do not take your directness personally. They do not expect you to be “on” all the time. You do not have to rehearse with them. You do not feel like you are one wrong sentence away from losing everything. And maybe the most beautiful part is that they stay.

It is not always loud or obvious. Sometimes it is just sitting in comfortable silence, or sending random messages without overthinking them, or being able to say “I’m overwhelmed” without having to explain every detail. It is knowing that a delayed reply does not mean the end. It is safe, not the kind that shouts, but the kind that settles into your bones and quietly tells you that you do not have to try so hard here.

When you have spent years losing people, it is hard to trust that someone will stay. You might overthink their kindness, or wait for the moment things change, or feel like you need to earn the friendship constantly. But real friends, the right ones, do not make you feel like a problem to solve. They make you feel understood, or at least like they genuinely want to understand. And that is enough.

I know it can feel like you are just bad at friendships. When things keep ending, when people misunderstand you, when you are always the one trying to figure out what went wrong. But maybe it’s not that you are bad at friendships. You have just been trying to build them in spaces that were not built for you. Because when you find people who get it, or who actually want to, something shifts. You do not feel like you are failing anymore. You just feel like yourself.

And yeah, losing people hurts. It can make you question everything. But the other side of that is that when you do find a real friend, it feels different. It is deeper, steadier, not based on pretending. It is based on being seen and still wanted there. And after everything, that kind of friendship means more than a hundred surface-level ones ever could.

So, if you have been through this, losing people, trying again, feeling like it is always just out of reach, you are not the only one. Even if it feels like you are. And the right people? They are not looking for a perfect version of you. They are just looking for you.

Love,

Your autistic bestie!

Book of the week: we are still on Shatter Me. I am still in a reading slump, besties!!!