54: The pink flowery gloves
What are friends?
In my early twenties I was living with my then girlfriend while she went through grad school. We had moved to a new city for her program and I didn’t know anybody, or have a purpose of my own other than following my girlfriend. Most of the people we hung out with were her classmates. I really liked her classmates - they were smart, attractive, funny, and they liked to drink a lot (which was my favorite activity at the time). There was a small group that stood out to me as the ones I wanted to fit in with - I admired them in some way; they seemed cool to me. They were stylish, tasteful, unique, funny, and seemed welcoming. Grad school was so intense that we all bonded and became close quickly. I was not a student, but I went to all the student social events and felt like part of the group.
The first year of the program we hosted a holiday party in December for a few friends who hadn’t traveled for the school break. Someone was always hosting a party for something. The students partied to relieve the stress of their program, and everyone was young enough that it felt like a continuation of the college lifestyle. Parties were an occasion to drink and let loose. They didn’t feel like the messy, smelly, college house parties that I had vague memories of from senior year. No frat people, no cases of Busch Lite, no gallon sized bottles of the cheapest gin or vodka available, no plastic cups. Instead, there was wine in real wine glasses, local beer, and recognizable name brands of vodka and gin in colorful bottles. All the other partners of students were either themselves students in some other program for upwardly mobile professionals, or they were already professionals of one kind or another. I was the outlyer, imagining myself as an artist while I worked low wage jobs that didn’t require a college degree.
We had all only known each other for six months, but everyone felt close. People had brought gifts to exchange for this party - something it would not have occurred to me to do, if my girlfriend hadn’t explained it to me. Nothing consequential, just small things that attempted to be clever. I was terrible at picking out gifts, even ones that were meant to be jokes or small gestures of affection. I could never imagine what another person might want, or might find appealing, or funny. I knew it was bad to buy a gift for someone else that was actually something I wanted, but understanding what someone else might want was beyond me. I don’t remember what we got for our friends, but I’m sure it was my girlfriend who picked, purchased, and wrapped our offerings.
I didn’t expect to receive anything myself - I figured any gifts for us would be directed to my girlfriend or vaguely to the two of us. Even though I felt like I was part of this group, I also knew I was on the periphery in some ways and didn’t expect to be fully included. So, I was surprised when Mark and Hugo, the couple I most enjoyed hanging out with, gave me a small present. I was touched by the gesture, and immediately sorry that I hadn’t gotten them anything specific. I unwrapped the package to find a small pair of gloves. They looked kind of like gardening gloves, but softer. They were floral and pink. I was confused and didn’t understand what they were (they didn’t seem like they were substantial enough to wear outside in the cold, and they also didn’t seem to have any practical use). Mark and Hugo smiled at each other as I thanked them. My girlfriend laughed. “That’s awesome!” she said. I looked at the label, “Moisturizing Gloves” it read, with a drug store price sticker still visible ($2.99).
“You wear them overnight while you are sleeping,” Mark explained.
“It’s because your hands are so dry!” my girlfriend added. It was true that my hands were dry. I didn’t bother with moisturizing lotion (or really any self care things other than basic washing and tooth brushing).
“It’s not just for you,” Hugo said.
“If your hands are softer, she’ll be happier” Mark interjected, glancing at my girlfriend, who rolled her eyes.
I didn’t understand the implication, but I said thank you and took the gift as a sincere gesture. I wondered if everyone wore gloves like this while they slept. Did that explain why my hands were always so dry but other people didn’t seem to have the same problem? Was this another example of something that everybody else in the world knew about but I was oblivious to? I was used to making those discoveries, to experiencing the moment when I see something, or come to understand something, for the first time only to realize that it was common knowledge for the rest of humanity all along.
That night, before I went to bed, I followed the instructions on the glove package (essentially just to put lotion on your hands, then put on the gloves, and leave them on all night). My girlfriend laughed when she saw me putting them on, but didn’t say anything after that. I wore them every night for a couple of weeks before I fell out of the habit. I didn’t seem to notice any particular change, and it was annoying having to add another step to my bedtime routine.
Months later, we were packing up to move to a different apartment. I found the gloves as we were emptying the drawers of our nightstands. “Oh, these are the gloves Mark and Hugo gave me for Christmas,” I said. My girlfriend laughed when she saw them.
“I can’t believe you ever wore those!” she said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
She looked at me skeptically. “It was a joke,” she said. “You didn’t realize that? Nobody thought you’d actually wear them.”
“Huh,” I said, confused.
I thought back to the night they gave me this present that I didn’t realize was meant to be a joke. What was the joke? Why was it funny? Was I meant to be a part of the joke, or was I the butt of the joke? It is a common occurrence for me to not understand jokes, but usually I can tell when someone is making a joke because of the tone of their voice, or the reaction of others (plus, a lot of people laugh at their own jokes, which is always a safe queue to rely on). Often I laugh at jokes that I don’t get because it’s easier to pretend than it is to ask for an explanation. In turn, when I attempt to make a joke, or deploy humor in any kind of way, others usually don’t find it funny or understand it. In fact, I find more often people think I’m being rude rather than making a joke, so I’ve worked to suppress the sarcastic tendencies that I have and to refrain from trying to be funny.
My girlfriend knew me well enough by now to see the confusion in my face and come to the realization that I didn’t get it, even all these months later, even after she told me it was a joke. She could tell that she had to spell it out for me. “It was a sex joke,” she explained. “I had complained about your dry hands during sex.” I tried to take in this information and process it in real time. She had complained to them about my dry hands during sex? She talked about our sex life when I wasn’t around?
“That’s why they said it was a gift for you, not just for me,” I finally articulated.
“Yeeeaaaah.” she said, stretching out the word to emphasize the ridiculously long amount of time it took me to understand the implication.
I still didn’t really understand or appreciate the joke. But what I did understand is that I was the object of the joke. The joke was on me - others found it funny at my expense. And the piece of the joke that I was exposed to, the receiving of the non-gift gift, was only a small part of it. The real joke, I supposed, was when they were all talking about me and laughing when I wasn’t there, and plotting to buy these gloves and give them to me for Christmas. I tried to think at that moment that it was a sign of affection, that it meant they felt close enough to me to joke in such an intimate kind of way, that it meant I was truly a friend (this, it now occurs to me, is how I might explain to a child why other kids were teasing them). But that isn’t how I felt at all. I felt like I was being laughed at, that people talked about me in disparaging ways when I wasn’t around, that I must often be the butt of jokes that I don’t understand. It emphasized to me the truth to my fears that I didn’t really have friends, that the people I hung around only tolerated me because they liked my girlfriend, and that when I showed up the only way for people to avoid being annoyed was to treat me like a joke.
Those are the feelings I had in that moment, and they are feelings I’ve often had when I think about friendships. But, I have to ignore or suppress those feelings to keep my sanity. This is hard to do when you feel like you have to work at it to make people like you. What I realize now, that I never grasped when I was younger, is that nobody really wants to hang out with someone who is working too hard to be liked. At the same time, I realize that I’ve been judgmental of others in the past the way I felt judged by the people I wanted to be close to. In trying to make myself be more like someone the “cool people” wanted to hang out with, I treated others whom I perceived as “not cool” badly. Instead of accepting myself and hanging out with people who seemed to like me, I judged myself and wanted to be someone else. And, instead of accepting others who I felt a connection to, I judged them and tried instead to connect with people I didn’t really meld with. This is all much easier for me to understand now that I have the language of the autistic community, but none of this seemed obvious before.
There are some friends I used to see on a regular basis that I haven’t seen or heard from in years. I stopped calling them, and they stopped calling me. For the most part, those are the friends I was never really sure about. The people I hoped were my friends, the people I aspired to be friends with, but with whom I never felt secure in my friendship. The people I felt like I had to perform in the company of, to try to anticipate what they would find funny or entertaining (and failing at that, usually). These are the kind of friendships, I now realize, that I don’t need and that are not helpful. That doesn’t mean I don’t need friends at all, just that I am learning to get better at recognizing true friendship and prioritizing it rather than grasping at something less real.