By Marion Small talk to me is talking about absolutely nothing for no reason. It can feel really fake when people ask me how I am when the only answer they really want is that I am fine, and that they are highly unlikely to be actually honest about how they are back. If they are only small talking to butter me up for a favour it can feel even worse! I’d rather they got to the point. When autistic people are communicating naturally with each other, we don’t tend to small talk nearly as much! Our shared interests, the things we are passionate about: that’s what we usually want to talk about. And we often don’t want to waste time and energy following a meaningless script where people say things just for the sake of it. So we may not ask, “how are you, how was your weekend, your week, what is the weather like with you?” This isn’t because we don’t care about each other, we do very much. We just want to get right into the good bits of the conversation! “Hey, I’m super happy to see you, have you read this article? Have you seen the new episode of Star Trek? How did you enjoy the film you saw last week?” And get stuck into the things we really want to discuss. Sometimes we will use small talk to end a conversation, just to check there wasn’t anything else important the other person wanted to talk about. But mostly I trust that if my friends want to tell me about the usual small talk stuff, they will.
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