Ah, the friends thing. Some musings...
Often, not always, the ASD 'friends thing' is misunderstood greatly by NT folk. Because NTs are capable of having tons of friends (well, not tons by weight, but you know what I mean), and socialising with them in noisy echoey smelly crowded places with lots of eye contact and touching and smiles and shared pretend play, that becomes the target for us too.
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If we play 'our way' - next to a child, in quiet, not looking at them - then that's seen as us ignoring the child or having no social skills. Not to us it isn't. We have our own sort of social skills. For example we can see well out of peripheral vision, so we don't need to stare directly at a child. And if we do, it's painful and distracting.
And for us, the shared task is how we play, how we learn, how we develop our interests. The repetition isn't us being obsessive for no reason, it's us testing and retesting systems to the finest detail, something other children find boring but we find essential in order to understand that tiny part of life before we feel secure enough to move on to the next testable bit of life.
Some (not all) parents or teachers really do think that we have to learn to do social skills only the NT way or it won't count. If they tried getting the children to play with us in ways that we could cope with from time to time, and understand us, it'd work ten times as fast as us having to do the hard work every single time and getting totally worn down by it.
But although people are happy to use sign for children who are deaf, and guide a child who's blind, a child with an ASD is often (not always)expected to have to learn to pretend and act as if they have no disability at all in order to achieve 'success' in the eyes of the parent and teacher. "Hooray, he or she no longer looks at all autistic!"
I wonder if they'd applaud a blind child who could pretend she could see things, or a deaf child who could pretend they can hear? Society 'applauds' me if I can pretend I can see and hear things I can't, and socialise in ways I find painful and exhausting, that's for sure.
All very odd.
The friendship and social skills 'thing' really is very, very powerful and people don't always think about it and us in any logical way as yet.
Make friends? Yes. Absolutely. A friend at a time, probably somewhere quiet, a friend who shares our interests and helps us develop in ways that respect who we are. There are ones like that out there in all sorts of specialist hobby or special-interest-clubs.
From my point of view, it was a totally bizarre experience for me as a child to have be engaged in discovering the finer points of some amazing set of facts about physics, maths, music, mechanics...and some child wanted me to go walk aimlessly round the block with them to talk about some pop star, which was seen by adults and the other children as Far More Important and a Sign That You Can Have a Friendship. Well, if the children had been interesting, I'd have been interested in engaging with them more. That may seem rude, but it's often true of us. Often (not always) our brains work at speeds and in detail that other children cannot keep up with, & have no interest in, and which concentrate on the tiny details and differences that they can't even see. But they mistake that for us being obsessed with something pointless. Oh well.