Both Of Us Being Gay Isn’t Enough To Carry This Friendship

i met another gay mom through our kids’ school, but our kids are not friends or close in age, but because we’re both gay i think we considered being friends and exchanged info, and me and my wife have done a few park hangs with her and her wife, but the conversation always eventually starts to drag. i get the impression her life is pretty straight outside of her marriage and I’m the only gay person she knows and she wants her life to be gayer. i’ll suggest gay tv shows or movies to her (she’s never heard of any of them) and sometimes we can text a little bit about that but it always fizzles. i just don’t think we’re meant to be friends but she keeps reaching out and trying to make plans? i’m pretty busy as is with friends i really like but don’t see enough so this friendship just doesn’t seem like a good way to spend my time. but i don’t know how to kindly end this friendship and it feels rude to just decline all her invitations to hang out.

Valerie: Since this is a situation where you, presumably, will have to keep running into this person since your kids go to the same school, a slow fade might be the way to go here. Theoretically, if you stop messaging her first (but still answer her texts) and continue to politely decline invitations to hang out, she will eventually take the hint. I don’t normally suggest a slow fade, but since you’re just acquaintances, I feel like a “I’m sorry but I don’t really have time for new friends right now” conversation feels a little serious for the situation; but! Always an option. Or, if it truly is that you just aren’t a great match, but you don’t DISLIKE her: See if your friends would be okay with you inviting her to a group hang or two. That way, you still get to see your friends, and maybe she’ll meet someone else she clicks with better, and you’ve helped expand her gay world without having to take on that burden alone. Or work with her to start a queer parents club for all the queer parents at your school.

Summer: Yeah I concur with Valerie. Don’t ghost her, but wind down the texting, reduce the small-talk, and only keep contact to a polite minimum. Hopefully it’ll fizzle and you can move on with life. I’m a little saddened by her position, since she wants more of your shared friendship but it can’t be forced if you’re incompatible.

Winding down the friendship might also bring it to a low ebb that’s bearable for both of you. It’s strange and frightening to me, but I know that some friendships are built on small-talk with no deeper engagement. One of my best friends just makes regular chit-chat with me and we usually don’t take on each other’s media recs or do anything together because our lives are so different. This might become viable once you’ve let the current dynamic down gently.

Ashni: I don’t think it’s rude to decline invitations to hang out. You don’t owe anyone friendship! This is a lesson I am just now learning in my early 30s, but friendship needs to feel good for both parties. Not everyone who is gay or has a common interest/identity with you is going to be your person.

If you want practical advice, I think you could decline all the invitations from her to hang out just the two of you. Continuing to text will probably send mixed signals. She might think you’re just as interested in a friendship as she is. If you want to help her engage with her queerness a little more, you could invite her to join you and your queer friends for a group hang. You’re a parent, she’s a parent – you could lean on the fact that you’re too busy, I’m sure she’d understand that. And in a group setting, you can rely on others to do some of the heavy lifting that comes with interacting with an acquaintance who you know you don’t want to be better friends with. Plus, who knows? Maybe she’ll find someone in the friend group who might be a better friendship fit for her!

I’m autistic, diagnosed age 7. I’m starting to lose patience for friends who have been self-diagnosing themselves as “on the spectrum,” especially when the diagnoses come hand in hand with a demand for social accommodations. Everyone is always ‘stimming’ or having ‘sensory issues’ or feeling ‘overstimulated,’ and I bristle when they look at me as a source for relation or empathy. I brought up my concerns with a friend, mentioning that I felt strange about giving someone’s self-diagnosis the same consideration as my own. The friend told me I was gatekeeping, and that there can be roads to diagnosis that are not formally medical. But it feels like they’re turning my real, lifelong struggles into a clown show. Maybe I am reading this wrong? It’s difficult to know, so I thought I would ask all of you. 

Valerie: On one hand, there are definitely people who take things too far, or who misuse certain terms, and that can be frustrating. I’ve run into a lot of people who learned certain therapy phrases on Tiktok and try to weaponize them into excusing their bad behavior and it can be exhausting, so I do understand where your frustration can be coming from. However, you can’t dismiss all self-diagnosis outright. There are barriers to getting a formal diagnosis, especially as an adult, especially adult women, especially especially adult women of color. Health insurance and doctor’s appointments cost money, not everyone’s doctor is willing to recommend assessments at a patient’s request. You were very fortunate to get diagnosed young. It’s very possible some of your friends who have self-diagnosed aren’t actually on the spectrum, but it could also be true that they DO need those social accommodations. Stimming isn’t exclusive to autism, neither are overstimulation or sensory issues. However, if you think they’re using THOSE phrases wrong, I think that’s worth a conversation with them. As you know, autism IS a spectrum, and it’s not up to you to decide if they’re on it or not, but you CAN talk to your friends if they think they’re misusing terms or misunderstanding your own experience with autism.

Summer: I used to feel the same way about this topic as you do, and just as strongly. Strangely, my views softened after I was assessed for autism (and was deemed very autistic).

I don’t think you’re totally ‘reading it wrong’ because it can be frustrating when people who don’t necessarily need accommodations request them. It’s also frustrating when people veer into treating mental conditions/neurodivergence as a hat they can wear, when others (like us) don’t have a choice and often suffer from the experience.

But it’s also important to remember that most diagnoses start as self-diagnoses. As in, most people realize there’s something different about our mental state because we saw (or were shown) evidence of our difference and had to consider it. Then we brought those suspicions to a professional for the ‘professional’ assessment. Most places on Earth don’t screen for every diagnosable condition—universal autism, anxiety, or depression screening doesn’t exist in my country. People find out on their own. And of those who do find out, not everyone can (or wants to) engage with the healthcare system to make it ‘official’. I think self-diagnosis on its own is less professionally and legally valid, but I don’t think it’s less interpersonally valid.

Like, I never had a formal diagnosis for my eating disorder, but it matches anorexia nervosa/atypical anorexia nervosa pretty perfectly. I’ve spoken to my doctor about it and we agreed that a formal diagnosis wouldn’t be helpful to me since I know about it and I can work on it without the label. Likewise, I nearly killed myself in my teens but never got a diagnosis for anxiety or depression even though they were right bloody there. I learned those terms later.

Even so, I believe your frustrations have validity because exposure to formal diagnosis/assessment does give you an extra layer of knowledge above what a layperson can learn online. I don’t think it’s right that your concerns are dismissed when others expect their concerns to be met, but that’s more a question of fairness than whether self-diagnosis is acceptable or not.

For my part, I think it’s better when we give self-diagnosed people consideration and accommodations too. People can request accommodations/consideration independently of their formal diagnosis. My sensory needs ebb and flow, and are not written in a firm list somewhere. Mental health is a very fluid thing. And there are lots of people out there who have support needs but don’t meet all the diagnostic criteria or can’t access healthcare. In their shoes, requesting those accommodations socially is the only way they have to advocate for themselves. I try to take their needs seriously in the same way I want mine to be.

Your friends’ self-diagnoses aren’t medically or legally valid, but I believe in people’s agency to assert who they are. I’d rather live in a world where people inadvertently misused mental health concepts because they’re widely disseminated, than live in one where nobody knows and nobody can get help.

Nico: I can understand feeling this way, especially if you suspect the self-diagnosis is better explained by something other than ASD, but, at the same time, we cannot know someone’s internal reality. Additionally, people who are diagnosed with ASD later in life might have had less access to resources related to that diagnosis in childhood, and so, as an adult, self-diagnosis, as opposed to some kind of lay proxy diagnosis by one’s parent/caregiver, is, as my colleagues have pointed out, the gateway to seeking more formal diagnoses and subsequent treatment.

It’s possible that your friends are over-utilizing supports like stimming because they have not yet been able to access proper therapies / supports for ASD and are reaching for stereotypes because they offer a vision of what coping looks like. I just hope you will have grace for them and allow them their own growth journey, understand that many things are not static and will change.

If you do not learn the word for something, you cannot name it. So, if your friends learned of the existence of autism later in life, then they may have never had a reference that helped explain their experiences prior to this point. Because of that, it’s likely you were given more tools to develop more coping skills. Your friends may be experiencing for the first time what it feels like to exist and be in a comfortable space without masking and without feeling social pressure to appear neurotypical, a pressure I think you may have experienced but which it is possible they never felt allowed to try to drop prior to self-diagnosis. The “letting go” that you’re seeing might feel cringey, but it also feels cringey to some when a cis woman discovers she is bi when she is in her 30’s, or when someone decides to explore polyamory in their 40’s, or when someone is first encountering a trans identity and embracing everything they can find regarding that identity that matches with their new self-knowledge at 16. I think that we as a culture translate earnestness and newness into cringiness, but we don’t have to choose to feel that way or to accept this as valid. I also think that sometimes autistic people can become really irritated with other autistic people who present with less social understanding as a kind of shame ritual. I think perhaps this is a learned defense mechanism or something, but others have pointed this phenomenon out.

Additionally, in these times, being formally diagnosed and having that on record can carry risks. There are multiple countries that apply extra scrutiny toward or outright ban autistic immigrants. Jobs are technically required to accommodate you, but a certain employer might scrutinize how you show up socially and use it as justification for firing you because they had the tip-off that you would be vulnerable to their manipulation from your self-disclosure of autism, and they just cannot have anyone that observant and honest around them because they need the opportunity to be dishonest. You might be denied opportunities. You have to jump through hoops for government jobs or the military. You are alerting predators to your vulnerability. All to say, there are numerous reasons for not wanting a formal diagnosis on record that has nothing to do with whether or not that diagnosis is legitimate. In fact, I know of parents who intentionally did not pursue diagnoses of their kids for these very reasons, instead allowing them to choose later. Of course, this tends to be more possible if the autistic person has low support needs, but still, it could leave a person who did not have an understanding of who they are feeling confused. Maybe this is the situation of one or more of your friends. Ultimately, I think the timing and nature of diagnosis is more out of an individual’s control than in it. After all, you probably didn’t instigate seeking diagnosis at seven, and so if the people around you had not chosen to do so, you might not have been diagnosed and you would be falling into the exact category of person you are inquiring about. I will say that no diagnosis excuses cruel or boundary-pushing or violent behavior, just to put that out there. If you feel a friend is testing or pushing your boundaries, that is on them to reign in. This is very much “they might be on their own journey” advice that transforms into “absolutely not” advice if they do not respect the same considerations when it comes to you.

Riese: I’m actually going through this right now; where between the demands of a full-time job, caring for a very high maintenance toddler, and a million fun health issues that arise at my age — I don’t have time to take the next step out of “therapist unofficial diagnosis” to “an official diagnosis,” which requires several days of testing, so it’s unlikely I’ll do it any time soon, so I just live in this space of not knowing. So — I could be off base here and I apologize if so but — is it possible that what you’re actually upset about is that you don’t think all of these friends actually have ASD, and you don’t want to make accommodations for people who you think are pretending to have what you know you have? I feel like maybe a good next step would be to just sit down and talk to them about their experiences, and see if that opinion changes, or doesn’t.