It depends on what they have going on. Small talk is literally painful to me to participate in, and I have no intention of trying to fix that because I’m not wrong or broken, just different, with different social needs that are met by people similarly different.
Autistics don’t small talk for a set of good reasons, including that it’s quite pointless and superficial to how we operate in the world, and we don’t get the same things out of it as neurotypicals. We have our own version of small talk, which is diving right into sharing special interests. It tells us what we need to know about the person we are talking to like small talk does for NT.
For us, those small talk conversations aren’t small moments of goodness. They might be for you, and that’s cool, but not us.
This might be interesting to you, or not, as you like. It goes over some of the reasons people on the spectrum don’t like small talk, and how we perform the same functions to maintain our social lives, but go about it differently.
I have autistic acquaintances that are kinda friends, and it takes shifting mental gears to have good interactions. It really helps when the individual says up front that they don’t like/want/have skill at the usual preliminaries amd wants to just talk about more specific things.
Bridging that neurofunction gap can be very hard on both sides, and it’s always an ongoing learning experience.
All of that being said, it is also very nice when both/all people present make that effort. It’s harder for autistic folks, or so it seems, but without at least a little willingness to communicate about how to communicate, it’s a much harder thing to make work.
It depends on what they have going on. Small talk is literally painful to me to participate in, and I have no intention of trying to fix that because I’m not wrong or broken, just different, with different social needs that are met by people similarly different.
Autistics don’t small talk for a set of good reasons, including that it’s quite pointless and superficial to how we operate in the world, and we don’t get the same things out of it as neurotypicals. We have our own version of small talk, which is diving right into sharing special interests. It tells us what we need to know about the person we are talking to like small talk does for NT.
For us, those small talk conversations aren’t small moments of goodness. They might be for you, and that’s cool, but not us.
This might be interesting to you, or not, as you like. It goes over some of the reasons people on the spectrum don’t like small talk, and how we perform the same functions to maintain our social lives, but go about it differently.
https://www.autisticstudies.com/communication/autisticsmalltalk
Yeah, that’s very true.
I have autistic acquaintances that are kinda friends, and it takes shifting mental gears to have good interactions. It really helps when the individual says up front that they don’t like/want/have skill at the usual preliminaries amd wants to just talk about more specific things.
Bridging that neurofunction gap can be very hard on both sides, and it’s always an ongoing learning experience.
All of that being said, it is also very nice when both/all people present make that effort. It’s harder for autistic folks, or so it seems, but without at least a little willingness to communicate about how to communicate, it’s a much harder thing to make work.