Aspies For Freedom

To me, eye contact feels... invasive. It's a breach of personal space and can mess up my concentration.

To me, eye contact is partly uncomfortable (usually, but with exceptions), and partly just doesn't feel necessary for communication.

I avoid eye contact at all times because I feel it to be confronting and when in public places/crowds usually look through people.

But, my pet-hate is knowing i am being stared at.
I'm the same as my cat, when she is outside and suddenly realizes i'm watching her she behaves differently.

eye contact for me its either not enough or too much..tough call. I make eye contact to people who appear freindly and those who dont appear freindly..well..I dont want to look at you anyway.

I dont have any eye contact with unknows so i tned to roll my eyes around almost avoiding them looking into my eyes

I think my relationship with eye contact seems a bit odd. I sometimes stare at interesting and interesting-looking people that I don't know. However I really can't stand eye contact with acquaintances or work people that I don't know well. I also don't like eye contact with people I am close to, it feels too intense, but I can stand it if I need to.

Although a dog who's comfortable with you and loves you (or is a needy acquaintance LOL) will sometimes keep prolonged eye contact.  Of course, it's usually meant to start you petting him/her, but often they'll keep the eye contact during the petting.  They just love us.

Re. the eye contact with animals . . . what I was talking about with dogs is really a 'soft' gaze.  It's not a 'staring down' type of thing at all.  There's a big difference.

I watched a 20-min. online 'lecture' by a scientist the other day, and found I couldn't really absorb what he was saying as long as I was watching him visually.  I had to look at a 'blank' area of my screen, or away from the computer entirely, or else I'd lose track of what he was saying.  Which made me very aware that there's a multisensory-stimulation issue going on with my eye-contact problems, as well as what I think of as my 'emotional' discomfort with it.  

The fact that it was a situation where it was not only one-way communication, but that the 'other person' doesn't even know I exist, was what made me think about this differently.  There was no emotional investment, no personal contact issue . . . I just couldn't process both the visual stimuli and the verbal at the same time.  Interesting.

When I was young I was very uncomfortable with eye contact. I realised by the time I was about 10 years old that this made me seem strange, dishonest, unfriendly, etc, and I made a concious effort to make good eye contact with people. I think I went overboard without realising it, to the point where I maintained almost constant eye contact when talking to people. Being aspergian, I didn't realise that people were not seeing that as normal either, and for many years I received strange reactions from people; intimidation (poor neurotypicals!), guilt (hehehe), the perception that I was far more interested in them than I actually was, and in some cases girls would think I was interested in them (and being aspergian, I would rarely realise until long after they'd started showing signs back, which several times has got me into trouble!). I didn't realise until about a year ago that I made too much eye contact, my girlfriend pointed this out to me, along with the fact that I'm giving these impressions out to people!

I used to practise making eye contact when I was at high school. I caught public transport to and from school, I noticed that people would look each other but quickly look away when the other person looked back (very strange games people play!), so I decided to play the game a bit differently and if someone looked at me I'd stare back at them, both of us fully aware of what I was doing. It was a challenge for me at first, especially when I knew the other person was usually freaking out (perhaps this was a bit cruel ), but I figured that if they were happy to look at me when I wasn't looking it was okay for me to look at them if they knew I was doing it... made sense to me! LOL After a few years of playing that game every morning and afternoon, making eye contact while talking to people was no challenge at all!

In the past 6 months I have been taking care to work on my eye contact "problem".  I have made many observations, some might all be entirely imagined, but have not yet understood what they mean.  I am hoping someone has made similar observations or can provide an alternative interpretation:

1) When I am at a party, I can tell, based on people's eyes, who has taken a sip of alcohol already.  After they have had just a little alcohol, I get this creepy feeling that I am staring at a moving and talking puppet and not a person.  I have often wondered if this is connected to the pupils' dilation being affected by the alcohol, which, I believe is used by state patrol to test for driving under the influence.

2) Lots of people have trouble matching my eye contact while in conversation.  Basically, if I don't avert my eyes, they will.  Thus far I have only met a couple of people who kept mutual eye contact with me for longer than a second...and it seemed like we were in a friendly staring contest that seemed to never end.