hi i’m sorry for the long post but i’m overwhelmed from this situation and need some outside perspective lol.
so i (23) just want to include some background: i’m autistic, and i have a lot of social anxiety. this is why my primary mode of communication is through text. i don’t mind hanging out or talking on the phone, but a lot of the time texting is easier on me because (in a conversation) because i’m not overwhelmed by body language, trying to read tone, etc, so it’s easier for me to express myself.
that being said, i met an online friend in february of this year. we hit it off instantly, to the point we even planned a trip together despite only talking for a few months. it’d been a really long time since i made a good friend, like almost 4 years, so i was really happy. we used to talk a couple times a week, almost everyday after we finished work. to make a long story short, literally on my birthday they just disappeared. they send a message every so often, but they don’t ask to hang out anymore (but they agree if i ask explicitly) nor do they respond to anything i say (we used to tell each other about what happened through the day, so this was normal).
two weeks into their silence, i asked them if they were okay, because i was worried about the sudden silence and the fact they weren’t acting like themself. at first they said they were going through it, which i totally understood, but then this stretched onto a month. i was really missing my friend so i again asked if they were okay and they said they kind of forgot to respond to me most of the time because they’re wrapped up in video games. this made me sad but i can’t control what others do and i did ask for clarification anyways, so i just expressed i was glad that they were okay because i didn’t want to give the impression that i was pressuring them to talk with me, i just wanted to know what was going on. after that, i just went very quiet.
just yesterday they texted me asking why i hadn’t talked to them, when i was just giving them space so they could work through whatever they were struggling with. that felt like the right course of action b/c i thought they wanted to be left alone and that i may have been too suffocating, as well as other reasons. i expressed that i was currently struggling too, and that i was working long hours, so they said that i could talk to them literally any time for a distraction.
today sucked really bad, one of the worst days i’ve had in a while, so i decided to break my strict “no double texting” rule just to take the hand that i thought was offered to me. i sent maybe a few sentences once in the afternoon jokingly talking about a leak for a movie we’re looking forward to and then when i went home, saying that today was really hard. it’s just been silent.
i guess my questions are: what’s a normal expectation for online friendships and texting? and am i stupid to be confused by the state of our friendship? i’m really trying not to be clingy, but i just want insight bc if i’m being too much then i’ll just adjust my expectations and feel better knowing that i’m just misunderstanding. please help 😭