This is the eleventh post in my autism awareness month series.

My wife tells me I have friends. She's probably right. But I don't feel like I do — not in the way the cultural template describes. The deep reciprocal bond, the person you call when something happens, the relationship that persists without a reason to persist. That version of friendship feels mostly out of reach, and I've spent a long time wondering why.

The answer isn't that I can't connect with people. I can, and often do, sometimes intensely. The issue is maintenance.

Most people have something like a social maintenance reflex: an impulse that fires unprompted, that makes you think of someone and reach out, that keeps a connection warm between meetings. I don't have that reliably. Not because I don't care, but because the impulse simply doesn't fire. The friendship is real when the context is there: a shared project, a recurring situation, a work relationship with natural touchpoints. When the context goes, the connection quietly fades. Not from indifference. From the absence of the trigger.

This produces a pattern that can look, from the outside, like something it isn't. The person who engages intensely when you're in the same context, then goes quiet when you're not. The person who seems fine, then suddenly withdraws. The person who doesn't follow up after a conflict — not because they're stonewalling, but because internally the matter felt resolved, and the follow-up impulse never came. These can get read as manipulation, as using people, as not really caring. None of them are.

There's a flip side worth naming. The same system that doesn't store the emotional weight of a friendship also doesn't store the emotional weight of a conflict. Grudges don't accumulate. Wounds don't fester. When the context returns, the connection picks up with a freshness that can feel surprising to the other person — and genuine, because it is.

And when the structure is there — a shared purpose, a recurring reason to engage — the intensity and loyalty that show up are real. It's not that the caring isn't there. It's that it needs something to hang on.

Next post: on autism as a catalyst

This is part of my April 2026 autism awareness month series. First published on LinkedIn on 2026-04-24.