I never understood social interaction. I’ve never had any friends, close relationships with people, etc, etc... the whole shebang, you get the picture. By age 22, I’ve come to live with it. I’m not autistic - in fact, I work in public relations, and can be superficially charming. To confuse matters further, colleagues and casual acquaintances consistently describe me as ‘pleasant to deal with’, ‘well-brought up’, ‘fascinating to talk to’ and so forth. People get back to me and enjoy my company in one-off professional situations.
But deep inside, I’m mean and profoundly antisocial. I’ve only been able to evaluate it now, after a specific incident that happened last night, but it goes way back. Last night, I went to meet a friend for dinner. She is 39, we met through work and have been meeting up for lunch and going clubbing a few times (no more than 10 in total). This is rare for me, but I went along with it because she initiated it. I have many interests and a good erudition, but all she seemed to want to talk about consistently is men. That was difficult for me, as I found it a boring topic and couldn’t contribute anything, but I went along with that, too, again because it’s unusual for me to have someone that wants to spend time with me, and I wanted to try it. She decided to join a few apps to meet a man, and eventually convinced me to do the same, just to keep her company. With my complete lack of understanding of how intimate, informal communication is meant to work, that resulted in a few odd cases as well, where I’d had to abruptly stop talking to someone because I didn’t know how to behave. But mainly, I lost interest in the apps until fairly recently, with COVID-19 and everything, my friend convinced me to join a new one.
It’s an exclusive app where the user pool is quite limited. She started seeing a man she met on the app, went to dates, slept with him. All this has been going on for about two months. Whenever we meet for dinner, she would talk about him. He sounds distant, is obviously far less interested in her than she is in him (I’ve seen text exchanges), and has just left for the US without mentioning when and whether he’s coming back. She would mostly say how he’s too distant for her liking, she needs someone more emotionally available, and I would nod along. Exactly a week ago, this man (he has a really unique name, and I mean really unique, up there with the likes of Annunziata, Larabelle and such) liked my profile on the app. He is absolutely not my style, also I’m over the entire app experience anyway, but I thought long and hard about whether I should tell her. Here’s when social interaction comes in. My mother and a few other acquaintances advised me against telling her. I felt it would be best to say something because otherwise it would be something that had happened behind her back.
Cut the long story short, I told her as we were about to have dinner. The exact words I used were, ‘I think [guy’s unique name] liked me on [app name], do you think it’s the same [guy’s unique name]. She asked when this happened, which was a few days ago. I showed her the like and was completely open. She got up and left, leaving me to pay for both our orders. That’s not what interests me here, though. I paid, had a good evening, messaged her in the morning to apologise for upsetting her if I did, but trying to explain my reasoning. Again, I was very direct, saying that if I was in her place, I would want (or even expect!) to be told. Also, I emphasised that I didn’t message him, that we had zero interaction and that I felt it was something I had to share with her, so she had a full picture of who this guy is. I then said it’s to be expected that guys on apps write to many people at once and that it’s nothing to be upset about. I would have understood if her annoyance stemmed from me having interacted with him, which I didn’t.
She replied - and here comes my real question - that ‘what I said was hurtful’ and that she ‘doesn’t understand why I would show her the like’. I again said that it’s to keep her in the loop. But I honestly don’t understand why what I did was hurtful, and I don’t understand how other people knew it would hurt her in advance. I had nothing to do with the man, nor would I want to. I understand, analytically, that we all like to shoot the messenger/bearer of bad news. But equally, we’ve known each other longer than she’s known him. My intention was for her to go and look for another guy and stop obsessing over this one, which I is the advice I would still give her if she called me tomorrow. But I see that this, seen from an outsider’s perspective, is probably mean behaviour on my part. It’s not the only time, but it’s the best and most recent example. The problem is that I wouldn’t mind if she did this to me (I did tell her that), I would have seen this behaviour as perfectly acceptable. This applies to most other situations where I feel I don’t understand human behaviour, what upsets people and why. I wouldn’t mind any of it if I was on the receiving end.