I recently met someone at a party who got in touch later and said ‘we should be friends.’
I thought that was refreshing (when was the last time someone said ‘I wanna be your friend’ and you weren’t either in infant school or totally pissed). However - she then went on to say that she had no female friends. This gave me pause. She seemed very confident, socially skilled, typically NT, and is in her forties. It might not be unusual, reading this thread, but it’s more, why did she feel she had to disclose the lack of women friends? She knows I do have them, I spoke about my best mate, we had not discussed any of what I’m about to write, and she seemed a very nice woman, notably so.
I won’t hold it against her, though, cos I do have some experience myself 😂
I am not autistic, AFAIK, but had I been assessed at sixteen I could say looking back I would possibly have been diagnosed as such had anyone been interested. In my case it was to do with physical and psychological childhood abuse which I believe can produce similar responses in some instances. I found many fellow girls to be scarily unpredictable and I was perpetually astonished by spite - every time someone went for me was like the first time. I only stopped being surprised by nastiness at university.
I was traumatised quite young and have a strong memory of being nonplussed by most peer group social interaction maybe 90% of the time. As a teen I had almost zero ‘feminine’ stereotypical attributes (for example, both good and bad, don’t get mad - falling madly in love with pop stars and schoolboys/ jealousy/ deep and emotionally beneficial bonding/acute social awareness/ emotional intelligence/ crying/ getting weirdly offended by being looked at). I was accused of being a lesbian at high school because ‘I act(ed) like a boy.’ I presented as feminine, didn’t play loads of sport or do woodwork or go around with boys at that point. Now it’s not hard to for me to imagine why I may have stood out, what with being terrified of girls and paralysed emotionally. I was a magnet for girl bullies and it was tough. Until I was about 35 it had never occurred to me it was an option to proactively address someone who was making me unhappy. My best friend from 5-15 was in retrospect, a fairly dedicated frenemy. I just thought, for about a decade, ‘I wonder why she wants to be my best friend so much cos she seems to not like me.’
I was also baffled by most girl-to-girl interaction, so much nuance was lost on me. How did they get so close, so fast?
What was the magic ingredient?
So I made friends with boys. They just wanted to talk shit and get through the day unscathed. No doubt there were all different sorts of boys and some were less benign but I didn’t meet them. I was not looking to be picked, I was constantly called out for being gay and I didn’t want male admiration. I found boys my own age ick and would have been battered at home for even contemplating having a boyfriend. And when I was free of that risk, I wasn’t interested in ‘good guys.’ I was hell-bent on disaster, ie. older, womanising, creepy, patently unsuitable, all the usual messed-up attachment stuff. As a teen I was lonely and wanted a good girl-friend, which I did eventually get - and I reckon she taught me how to be a girl.
One of the common traits of all six of my now closest friends is that we just tend to say what we’re thinking. Four women and two men. Three of them are ND. If you are waiting for me to guess how you feel, I will need major clues, but fortunately we all operate on broadly the same wavelength. Frankness seems to be more widely reported as ‘male’ behaviour. Experience has made me better at guessing now what’s happening with people under the surface but that’s all it is - learning I better attempt to have a guess if I think there’s something wrong. I still tend to assume I’ve failed, or overstepped or asked too much. Sometimes they will say things like ‘eh? you couldn’t offend me!’ It’s really reassuring but it does make me realise how much I worry about it.
I’ve also learned how I am expected to behave by mimicking socially adept women and having some success, but often feel stressed and ‘out of sync’ with groups of women. I get on well with men, although anecdotally I find they are on superficial transmit more than women. You can totally have a male friend if you’re just willing to listen to his hobby chat! I find ND people of both sexes are easier to get to build relationships with. I briefly worked in a place where everyone was very open about their lives and challenges and there were many ND people - it was an eye-opener. A colleague asked me if I was autistic, I said no and they were like ‘yeah? Maybe get that checked ha ha.’
In most other situations when I meet a new woman I feel nervous. I do find this less with men - I am less often uncertain where I stand. They seem to appreciate effort to engage rather than find it a sign of failure. However, I don’t think that’s because they’re superior beings. They can definitely come across as more entitled, try to rip the piss and try and dominate everything in a much more overt way than women.
My closest friend still has to explain things to me that other people seem to instinctively know. In fairness, I also think young men are socialised quite differently now, and more men of all ages sometimes seem more angry and resentful towards women in general than they used to be. Perhaps that’s because they’re not so pally to me anymore in particular because I’m fat, middle-aged and knackered. Not that being nice to me would ever have got them sex but then, they weren’t to know that (my best mate explained that too lol). Perhaps it’s because many men feel more threatened than ever.
So this treatise is to say that there are probably reasons for women to say ‘I don’t really get on with women’ beyond internalised misogyny or wanting male validation. Sometimes it’s maybe because something bad has happened early on in their development which has made things tricky, or they’re damaged, or they’re scared.