What's the reason if I have no friends if it's not my fault?

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I will point out that this is not entirely true. I just have few friends (one or two). There has got to be a reason and there has got to be something I'm doing wrong.

Could it be that you just haven't had as much opportunity to meet and connect with people who are more like you, as opposed to the general neurotypical population? I think a lot of autistic/neurodivergent people connect better with other neurodivergent people, and I guess there are less of us than the neurotypicals. And of course, even autistic people are all wildly different and definitely not guaranteed to get on well with each other, so I suppose we in general can have a much smaller pool of people we might get on with to draw from in the first place. Plus we don't all walk around with I'M AUTISTIC tattooed on our foreheads so even finding each other can be difficult too.

I didn't even know I was autistic until I was already over 30, but looking back at all the people I've connected best with over the years, they were all either autistic or neurodivergent in some other way. I'm like you now, I just have one or two close friends and no one else. But now I understand who I am in a way I never did before, I'm making more effort to try to find and connect with people who are more like me.

Anyway, that's just me. You might have a different opinion/experience.

Framing. Being autistic is a major REASON I find it hard to make friends because autism, practically by definition, makes social skills hard, and making friends is a social skill. But if someone told me it's my own "fault" that I have few friends, I'd tell them to **** off. Because that's a value judgement, and an unfair one. "Fault" implies blame, not doing the best with what you have.

I don't have that many friends, either.....but it's by choice.

I find you compare yourself to other people too much. I should know----because I do the same thing sometimes.

I suspect we look at making friends the same way we look at everything else we try to do..
We expect 97 - 100% success.. And permanence.

If Love at First Sight is a thing.. Hate at First Sight must be also..

Plus I suspect our sources for how and what friendship is like.. may be skewed.
Movies, TV, books..? Probably wrong..

Maybe you don't smile enough. Smiles attract people.

There is no reason. A lot of bad or sad things happen in the world that have no reason.
There is no answer no matter how much you question some things or try to make the situation better. I stopped questioning a long time ago.

This probably won't be very comforting, but here's what I've concluded:

Important parts of social interaction occurs subconsciously. As someone with ASD, you can learn everything - how and when to smile, how much information to share, what topics to avoid - all of it. But you can't learn the stuff that happens subconsciously. Those tiny little micro movements, vocal inflections etc. that no one sees but that everyone feels.

So you can have a conversation which someone that plays perfectly, follows all the rules. And that person will still come away from that interaction feeling that something was off. And that reflects on the person they were talking to. They might not say so, they might not know it consciously, and they might not be able to say what it was but nonetheless they're left with a little niggling sensation that prevents them remembering the encounter as pleasant and wanting to do it again.

I think, with forced exposure (e.g. seeing people every day through work or some other necessary shared experience over time), it can be overcome and people will get used to us and start to appreciate the other parts of our personalities that make us people worth knowing.

But getting beyond that initial part, where they're not sure about us, it's what's hard. And why its so hard to make new friends.

That's what I think is going on.

It's not your fault. Those of us on the spectrum simply have a harder time making friends.

It's not only that we lack the social aptitude. It's also that the average person simply doesn't want to be friends with us.

There's no changing any of this. I've learned to live with it.