For a long time, I thought friendship was simple: people like you, so they spend time with you. When friendships fell apart, I blamed myself for “not trying hard enough” or “misreading social cues.” What I didn’t realise was that I was treating very different social connections as if they were the same thing.

Like many autistic people, I learned early on to mask — to soften my opinions, copy other people’s behaviours, laugh at the right moments, and hide parts of myself that felt “too much.” Masking helped me avoid being ostracised, but it came at a cost. When you’re constantly fitting yourself into other people’s worldviews and social rules, it becomes hard to tell whether you’re being accepted — or just tolerated for how well you perform.

Eventually, patterns emerged. Once I  learned to nam them, these issues became clearer and began to feel less personal. I now think of friendship as falling into three broad types. None are rare. None are inherently immoral. But confusing them causes a lot of unnecessary pain, especially for autistic people who tend to assume sincerity by default.

1. Shared-culture friendships

These are the friendships most people intuitively think of as “real.”

They’re built on shared values, interests, humour, background, or worldview. You might both be into the same niche hobby, care about similar political issues, or lose hours talking about the same obscure topic. The connection feels easy because it is.

For autistic people, these friendships are often the most stabilising — and also the hardest to find. Autistic people tend to think, process, and relate differently from the neurotypical majority. As a result, we often feel most understood by other neurodivergent people. But neurodivergent people are a minority of the population, which immediately shrinks the pool of potential shared-culture friendships.

Add to that the fact that many autistic people have highly specific interests, and the odds narrow further. The result isn’t social failure, but statistical scarcity. When these friendships do exist, they’re usually obvious in hindsight: conversations flow, energy feels balanced, and no one is keeping score. Crucially, masking isn’t required. Here, the difficulty isn’t recognising them, but finding them. 

2. Transactional friendships

These are not true friendships in the emotional sense, even if they initially appear to be.

They’re based on exchange: status, access, resources, validation, proximity to power, or social capital. One person has an asset of some kind— money, connections, popularity, prestige — and the other wants proximity to it. Sometimes both people are aware of the transaction. Sometimes only one is.

In these dynamics, affection is conditional. Interest increases when the “asset” is useful and fades when it isn’t. Support flows one way. Loyalty is situational.

Autistic people are particularly vulnerable here, partly because of masking. When you’re used to adapting yourself to fit in, it’s easy to slip into over-giving — offering help, emotional labour, or practical support to justify your place in someone’s life. Attention can feel like acceptance, even when it’s actually dependency.

It also helped me realise that not all disappearing friendships are betrayals. Some were never meant to be permanent. If you’re only “friends” with someone because you share a setting — school, university, a workplace — and the connection exists mainly for companionship, homework help, or passing time, that’s a context-based relationship, not a deep friendship. Once the shared context ends, the relationship fades. That doesn’t mean anyone did anything wrong. It means the bond was situational.

Understanding this mattered because I used to experience these endings as personal rejections. But in reality, there was nothing to maintain.

I learned this more painfully at university. I was new to the city and lonely. When a fellow student repeatedly asked for help in our course group chat, I was the only one who replied. That small act of kindness turned into what I thought was a friendship.

She was an international student on a scholarship, under intense pressure to support her family. I helped with notes, late-night calls, and eventually donated to a fundraiser. Over time, generosity stopped being a choice and became an expectation. Requests multiplied. When I said no, I was called stingy. My academic results were mocked. Respect disappeared.

The imbalance went beyond money. My neurodiversity was treated with suspicion. My anxiety was dismissed as negativity. Empathy flowed one way.

This is how transactional friendships often collapse: when one person feels obligated to give, and the other feels entitled to receive. Economic pressure and inequality can feed into this dynamic, especially at university — but understanding those pressures doesn’t mean accepting disrespect.

Kindness without boundaries isn’t friendship. Reciprocity doesn’t have to be financial, but it does have to exist — in respect, in empathy, and in effort.

3. Romantic-intent “friendships”

These are friendships in name only — and they’re more likely to happen to women.

One person wants a romantic or sexual relationship; the other believes they’re forming a platonic bond. The “friendship” exists as a holding pattern rather than a genuine connection.

For women, this dynamic is common because friendliness is often misread as availability. For autistic women, the risk is higher. We tend to communicate directly, invest emotionally once trust is established, and take people at their word. When someone says, “I just want to be friends,” we usually believe them.

I learned this through a long, confusing relationship with a man I met at work. On the surface, he was sociable, competent, and helpful. He often stepped in to support me in ways he didn’t with male colleagues.

At the time, I saw this as kindness. As friendship.

What I didn’t see was the power imbalance being built. His “help” framed me as someone who needed saving. Gratitude became the currency of the relationship. And because I was autistic and already masking heavily to meet unspoken expectations of professionalism, that support felt stabilising. I accepted it.

Only later did I understand that it was conditional. Beneath the friendliness was a hidden expectation: that closeness would eventually be rewarded with access, affection, or control. There wasn’t necessarily malice at the start. Often, people in these situations are avoiding rejection, hoping emotional proximity will turn into romance. But the result is still asymmetrical.

That’s the defining feature of romantic-intent “friendships”: hidden expectation. One person is investing emotionally within clear boundaries; the other is investing strategically, hoping those boundaries will collapse.

For autistic women, this is especially dangerous. Masking teaches us to doubt our instincts, smooth over discomfort, and prioritise harmony over honesty. 

Why naming this matters

None of these categories make someone engaging in a particular type of friendship "good" or “bad.” What causes harm is misalignment: when two people believe they’re in the same kind of relationship, but in reality they’re not.

Autistic people are often taught to adapt endlessly and blame ourselves when things go wrong. Naming friendship types is a form of self-protection. It lets us ask a simple question:

Is this mutual, or is it conditional?

Once you can answer that honestly, you stop chasing the wrong bonds — and start valuing the rare ones that don’t require masking, performance, transaction, or hidden agendas.

Those are the friendships worth keeping.