Need help helping my friend

[Guest guest]

Hello all. I have a friend who has some problems. I’m nearly certain it’s not Asperger’s, but I thought since a lot of you deal with kids and friends with a variety of non-Asperger’s quirks you might be able to help me.

My friend— we’ll call him — seems to need his hand held through everything. is very intelligent, but has this McFly attitude towards the world. He’s very negative and just assumes he can’t do anything. Every time he meets someone new and talks to them, I see that he’s acting just fine and they seem to like him, but he comes away with an, “Oh, I fucked up. They didn’t like me” attitude. This is just one of the things he does but it is not the main reason why I’m writing.

Whenever I get together with , it is a Sisyphean ordeal. Often, I’m the one following up with phone calls and emails to say, “So, are we going to go see that movie?” etc. It didn’t bother me so much before (I’ve known him for 9 years, and I think that attests to my remarkable patience with him), but the straw that broke the camel’s back came when I was planning my 30th birthday. On Facebook, I sent out an invite to a get together I wanted to have at Central Park. Most people didn’t respond. I was a bit irritated, but not terribly so because most of these people I hadn’t seen in a while. is my best friend, and the fact that he didn’t respond was just something I felt was inconsiderate and nasty, even though he didn’t intend to be. I sent him an email with the subject line, “Fed up” and explained to him that I was tired of holding his hand through everything, that he has to pull the weight and follow up. It can’t be just me. He called me up and apologized, saying he had no idea why he didn’t respond. He said that he does this all the time, even with things such as forwarding mail to his ex-roommate, even with things as important as something from the IRS. It’s not a matter of his being lazy. For lack of a better way to describe it, he said it’s a sort of “fear of commitment.” I was about ready to kill him, but we talked it out and he promised he wouldn’t do it to me again.

I emailed this week and asked him if he wanted to see the new Harry Potter movie. He wrote back and said he did. I work in the Bronx and he works in Brooklyn (meanwhile I live in Brooklyn and he lives in the Bronx) and so I thought the best thing to do would be to meet in Manhattan for the movie, on the way home for both of us. He asked what the prices were and I told him. I also said we should order tickets online since Harry Potter always sells out quickly. Then he didn’t write back. That was Wednesday. On Friday morning, emailed me and told me the movie was sold out. Irritated, I wrote back and said that of course they were sold out as it’s the day of the show! I called him on my way to work (when the subway was above ground and I could get reception). Once again, he gave that, “I don’t know why I did it” explanation. Then when I got to work and had a few moments, I talked to him. He kept making excuse after excuse for why he can’t follow up, etc. I told him that if he still wanted to meet we could go to a little theater in Brooklyn that doesn’t take advance ticketing and probably wouldn’t sell out quickly either. I looked up show times. I told him to waste no time leaving work, just in case tickets might sell out.

I was coming all the way from the Bronx and he was coming from across Brooklyn. He called me when I was almost at the theater to tell me he had just left work. I asked why. He said because it would only take a half hour to get there. Once again, I had to remind him, “I told you to waste no time in leaving because the tickets might be sold out!” Needless to say, I got to the theater first. I bought the tickets, just in case, and called his voicemail and told him. Then I ran to get something to eat. He reached the theater when I was in the restaurant. He called me and said he bought the ticket. I blew up, not caring who was watching. I was fed up. I told him that he’d better hope they refund him because if they don’t he still has to pay me for his ticket that I bought. Fortunately (and probably since it was a small theater) they did refund him. We sat in the lobby talking (okay, I was shouting, but I was at my wits end) and finally we calmed down...

Something like this happens nearly every time we get together. I feel like I have to explain everything to him. One time, I told him to meet me in and Noble, and he showed up in a little hole-in-the-wall bookstore. Another time, I had to explain to him that the A subway line is the express version of the C— common knowledge for someone who had been living in NYC for so many years and taking these lines on a regular basis! If I tell him to meet me somewhere, it’s my job to give him directions. Even if he writes them down, he forgets them. He calls me to get them again instead of just running it on hopstop.com. A lot of these things— such as Googling his problems, etc.-- doesn’t occur to him. It also didn’t occur to him that he could look for a new apartment in advance instead of waiting until he was ready to move. He honestly thought that’s how it worked. He simply lacks common sense. On top of that is his bizarre “fear of commitment” thing. I really, really don’t get it.

He can’t afford a therapist. Even if he could, he’s reluctant to go because he’s afraid that a therapist will tell him that nobody else in the world has these problems or that the therapist won’t like him. He has this “I can’t” attitude towards everything. He also honestly thinks that he is the only one in the world with this issue, whatever it is, and finds it hard to believe that there’s a name for it. Of course, I had to remind him that this is how I felt until I learned about Asperger’s. But he still wasn't convinced.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? Does anybody know a good book to get that can help him? Sorry this was so long...