How To Learn Social Awareness

(There’s a video & newsletter version of this post. They are basically the same. Video is provided below if you’d prefer to watch & listen instead of read.)

About 8 years ago, a girl gave me a fake phone number when I asked her out on a date. We were both riding on a city bus in my then-home of Santa Barbara, and after a brief - and surely awful - conversation, I asked her for her number.

I’d been given fake phone numbers before, and I was feeling pretty suspicious as she put herself into my contacts. As soon as she handed my phone back, I immediately sent her a text message to “check if she got her number right”.

She saw it coming, though - she had just turned off her phone “so she could save battery”, at which point I understood what she’d done. I was MAD about it, even though I had absolutely no right to be. Thankfully, I kept that to myself and left her alone for the rest of the ride.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can look back and realize how incredibly messed up that was. I didn’t really understand it at the time, but looking back I was basically intimidating her into forking over her number.

In today’s issue, we’re going to talk about what it tends to mean when a girl gives you a fake phone number. I’ll give you a hint - it’s usually a sign you’ve made a few pretty huge mistakes, and that you’ve got some issues that you urgently need to work on.

As part of that, we’re going to look at why empathy is so hard for people with autism, how to get better at understanding your effect on other people, and how I’ve gone about “training” my capacity to use these skills. Ready? Okay, let’s dive in.

Forcing Conversation Is A Terrible Idea

So, the story I just told you was a social disaster from start to finish - I failed to be respectful & charming in about 15 different ways. Knowing what I do now, there must’ve been countless times that I should’ve stopped & walked away, but I didn’t.

I don’t remember the specifics of how our conversation went, but looking back, it seems obvious that I must’ve basically been forcing her to talk to me. I was very interested in talking to her, but the feeling wasn’t mutual - and what’s worse - she was basically trapped on the bus with me!

There’s a progression to meeting people, right? You make small talk, then go deeper, then exchange contact info, etc, etc. But at each step of that progression, you need to be checking to see if the other person is still engaged & interested in the conversation.

If they’re not, it’s super important that you politely disengage & leave them be. I did not do this. With every conversational “check point” that I blew past & ignored, she had even more reason to be afraid of me - instead of just disinterested in me.

Fear Is Not Useful (Even / Especially On Accident)

If a girl gives you a fake phone number, it’s not just because she’s not interested in you. It’s because she’s afraid. If she doesn’t like you but felt like she could turn you down without concern for her own safety, she probably would.

The fact that she decided to deceive you so that you’d go away means that you put her in a position that made her afraid - and gentlemen, I need to take a second and be crystal clear about something…

I will sometimes tell you that it can be okay to make people feel a little bit uncomfortable while you’re talking to them - but this is different. If you make someone afraid - without having a specific and excellent reason that you’re trying to intimidate them - you’ve screwed up in a big way.

Empathy Is The Crucial Missing Piece

If we’re really going to dig in to where things went wrong here, we need to take a hard look at one of my least favorite parts of autism. The main reason I treated that girl so poorly without even realizing I was doing so is because of a critical skill that I hadn’t learned yet.

If you’re a normal person watching this video, you probably don’t understand why anyone would ever behave like I did on that bus. The short answer is that one of the hardest parts about autism is how challenging it can be it to have empathy.

Oxford’s Dictionary defines empathy as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another”, and while that’s a fine description of how it presents to a third party, I prefer to think about empathy as a sort of mechanism.

To me, practicing empathy is the act of creating a mental model for what someone else might be thinking and feeling. Understanding the emotions and internal logic that someone else is being driven by is crucial to interacting with that person effectively - and autistic people are pretty terrible at it.

The fact that we suck at seeing things from another person’s perspective is one of the main things people tend to dislike about us. This lack of empathy is not a moral failing - but you’ll definitely need to find a way to fake it if you want to be able to interact with other people in a way they appreciate and enjoy.

One piece of good news? Figuring out how others feel - and how you might be making them feel - is something you can mostly reason through with logic - if you take the time to do so.

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