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The original was posted on /r/AmItheAsshole by /u/Organic_Mode774 on 2023-09-18 16:13:48.
TLDR at the bottom
I 24F just went on a trip with my 24F best friend. We have been best friends for 6+ years with minimal but normal conflict along the way. We are generally both really good at communicating and resolving things. We have also traveled together previously with minimal issues.
My friend is on the autism spectrum which sometimes presents sensory and social issues for her. She has improved dramatically over the years but still sometimes struggles.
On this trip, she was rigid and inflexible, and when things didn’t go according to plan she would pout and whine like a child. It really threw me off and I felt like I had to be ten steps ahead to make sure things didn’t go wrong or she would get upset. More than a few times this was blamed on her autism. When we returned and her mom picked us up from the airport, the whining intensified and she even started yelling at her mom in the car, which is really odd for her and I was appaled. I knew we were both tired but her mom was really helping us out and she was treating her so poorly.
I really tried to accommodate her (doing what she wanted, eating where she wanted, taking middle seats on planes so she wouldn’t be close to a stranger, etc.) But it never seemed like enough and she seemed pretty unhappy for most of the trip.
After we got home, I took SIX DAYS to write a message to her, to make sure I was gentle and concise. I commended her on how she has improved on these things over the years, but stated that it really took away from the trip for me. I reassured her that I still wanted to be friends and travel together, but I was hopeful that she would work on being more flexible, positive, and appreciative of the people in her life.
She got extremely upset, told me the criticism was unfair and I basically called her a mean, inflexible child (I was so careful to be kind and focus on behavior, not making it about her overall character) she didn’t want to travel together anymore, canceled on upcoming plans to see a concert, and has ghosted me since.
Am I the asshole for giving her potentially unfair criticism? Should I have left it unsaid and just not traveled with her again?
TLDR: traveled with a friend who behaved very poorly imo. Spoke to her about it afterwards and now she doesn’t want to be friends. Am I the asshole for criticizing my friend?
I say this as an autistic man with sensory issues of my own:
Sometimes you just gotta take responsibility for your own behavior. Even if you can’t control it in the immediate moment, whenever one of those moments of loss of control happens you need to later analyze it and determine a strategy for avoiding it.
On the other hand, imagine how “rude” a person with a broken leg might be if someone else jostled that leg. That’s basically what’s going on when an autistic person is being hostile: there’s a form of “pain” being experienced that, quite frankly, overwhelms self control.
But the two things can be true at the same time. I guess I don’t feel like typing out the entire explanation f why, but here’s something important for people with and without autism to contemplate: you can hold a person responsible for something they don’t have full control of.
You gotta be gentle and respectful, but it’s perfectly okay to tell your friend that it’s her job to be civil. It’s not fair that her broken leg is in her brain and hence not visible, but life isn’t fair and she can’t interact successfully in society unless she learns to control it.
(As much as possible, which is probably more than she thinks)
