I'm glad that HG had the humility to apologise, which is more than I can say for some people. Just make sure you keep her at arms length and don't get sucked in again. Concentrate more on making friends locally, in real life. I personally dislike HG, but that opinion was only formed from my experiences with her online. You know her differently, and I'm glad that you and her are on speaking terms again.
It's not like I haven't tried, Robert. I've been to a few social groups, etc, but it just doesn't work out for me because I hardly have anything in common with them. It just means that I'll have to bend over backwards in order to fit in, which I no longer want to do. I want to be surrounded by people who have similar interests to mine and who will accept me for who I am, and not people who will only like you if you apply to their standards.
Unfortunately, I can only find people like that online. If I had better experiences in real-life, I wouldn't resort to making online friendships so much. It's alright for people to suggest that making online friends is a no-no because they're rather lucky to have the friends they got in real life. Very lucky, indeed.
As much as hate to admit it, most of my friends are online. Most of My friends IRL are far away and scattered all over the country. I have people in the town that I'm on friendly terms with and a couple of neighborhood friends that I chat with from time to time and swap favors, house watching, babysitting the dog, helping with yard chores. The people on Fractalus and a couple on AI and of course here, like Callaway, PI, Odeon, Dunc, etc,.
Most times IRL, I am misunderstood or I do the misunderstanding, so not too many around here. I'm glad your keeping a degree of friendship with HG as a possibility. Your friendship will either be stronger or slowly fade away as time goes on. That is also a fact, many a friend from college has faded away for me. Priorities, responsibilities change, it's just a harsh fact. Social groups are ok, but, the one I have been invited to is mostly composed of younger aspies, only one of them I know personally. She was an aspie from aspergia who lived nearby here in Maine. She's only 21, nice girl, in fact she contacted me, not I her. She's just someone who loves to be social. We've even had her as a houseguest a couple of times.
Maybe one of these days I'll pop by into the social group, just to see what it's all about.
