How Long Do You Last At a Social Gathering?

[Running Girl]

Averaging about 30 to 45 minutes of really hyped up faking it. Sometimes i actuslly enjoy it. Then the exhaustion sets in, followed quickly by extreme discomfort or paranoia. Time to leave, like now! I finally learned I can leave without guilt, without even needing an excuse.

 

[Christine Jarvis]

Just wondering what everyone's limit is with socializing! Is it easy for you or hard? Does alcohol make it easier? Do you prefer to get lost in crowds or do you prefer small gatherings?

Most of the socializing I do is around adults that are drinking. I don't drink much, so the more they drink, the quicker I leave because things get loud quick. If I have a glass of wine, I can hang a bit longer. But I would say 1.5-2.5 hours and not very often. I also can hang longer if there is less people.

An optimistic guess is 30 minutes in a group, provided I don't have to speak or listen to anyone. One-on-one is longer, potentially a lot longer depending on the environment and the subject. If I need to hold a conversation while other conversations are happening, then maybe 10 minutes. I'd usually hide in a corner during gatherings.

I can barely do them at all and if it's longer than an hour or so out of town from my place I don't go. Like today my parents and sister went to go celebrate fathers day for my grandpa out of town at my aunt or uncle's house by where my grandma and grandpa live. Well, it's 2.5 hrs away from my place and I just can't do the traveling because it's up in the mountains and it makes me nauseous in addition to the fact that I just can't travel to a place more than an hour to an hour and a half away because it just takes me forever to recuperate and it makes me so tired about halfway through the time there that i'm on the verge of a meltdown and those are the worst things ever. As well as the fact that both my aunt and uncle have dogs and I have severe anxiety and am very scared around dogs. But sometimes I get very frustrated because I feel like one of my sister's doesn't the complexity and diversity of autism because she asked me if I was going to go with them and see my grandma and grandpa and I said no because of how much a long drive like that takes out of me. And then she asked me if i'm ever going to see my grandma and grandpa up there and I told her I call them sometimes. But, I wanted to scream and say that I didn't choose to be born with autism and I have more limitations than regular people do and I don't push past those limitations because I know it'll cause a meltdown and I just wish I could put her in my head for at least one day because then she might feel a little more sympathetic. And part of me also wanted to tell her that i have cousins that haven't seen my grandparents for years but I have an actual medical reason and for about 1.5 years I had spent every weekend helping take care of them when they lived at their old house near my parents and I was going grocery shopping, getting dinner, cleaning, etc. So it's not like I've never visited them and I was helping them before I was even diagnosed with autism. So imagine how hard that was for me. I just want my sister to have a little more compassion, sympathy, and understanding about what I go through everyday and the fact that I didn't choose to have autism and I have to live with it for the rest of my life; and I won't be able to do stuff like regular people do.

 

[Emily Write]

Social gatherings are much easier for me when they are small gatherings and much harder when they are large crowds. The less people there are, the better I am with interacting and getting to know others on more individual levels each.

I haven't been to a lot of parties where they serve alcohol. I don't drink alcohol as a whole and always leave parties that do serve them once people begin to get really drunk because it feels really awkward and uncomfortable when that happens.

 

[Streetwise]

Can't even bare to think about them nevermind go

 

[DK’s_Ghost]

I’m unsure about this at the moment - and it really depends on the person / people I’m socialising with.

So, I have a boyfriend who I can spend endless hours with, without feeling exhausted. I think this is because he doesn’t have any emotional subtext or social expectations, so it’s really easy to just be me with him.

With others, it varies depending on the people and the level of ‘social skill’ required for them. So I’ll be much less comfortable at a professional networking event, since I have to come off as vaguely ‘normal’, than I will at a private event where there’s no external consequences for coming off a little ‘weird’. My method as a teen was to just say something bizarre at the beginning of the conversation. This set the ‘standard’ pretty low and from then on I’d do OK because I wasn’t really expected to interact ‘normally’.

Recently, though, I’ve realised I have some pretty serious sensory processing issues with sounds and physical touch. So a lot of my issues with socialising with large groups, even where I’m allowed to be ‘weird’ or I know the people well, is that this kind of activity usually comes with a lot of background noise - even if that’s other conversations, music, traffic noise or something else. Having to concentrate on being social at any level, and being exposed to cacophonous sound, will wipe me out for days.

This does explain why I’d spend so many days in bed following a lot of social interaction in a public place - and why spending time with my girlfriend at home was far less exhausting than spending time with her on our regular long walks around the city.

I’ve got some hefty noise cancelling tech now - I’ve got the nuheara IQBuds. They changed my life, really. I can now leave the house without collapsing from exhaustion when I come back. I can spend time with friends, in public, without major issues. Setting them to receive speech and lower the background noise really helps, though it’s not perfect and does leave me a little more tired than if I go out on my own. But that’s completely manageable, now. I’d recommend them for anyone who has these kinds of sensory processing issues - and for those who don’t get a whole lot of use out of standard noise-cancelling (which I can only use indoors).

 

[Flint]

All my life I have been leaving gatherings earlier than most.

 

[Nairobi]

I am dead upon arrival. I have stressed for however many days or weeks ahead of time I knew about the social event. Once we had family decide to do a surprise visit the same day and I felt so unwell that we had to tell them we couldn't host them. I have now started making the conscious decision before hand that I will only stay 1-2 hours max. I did this recently though, and I think it disappointed the hosts, even though I had mentioned I would need to leave early - I ended up leaving earlier than I had said, though at the time I was disoriented and not aware that I did it. Anyways, the rest of the weekend was shot for me and I also took a day off of work, because I was already not ready to socialize at all - it was a once in a lifetime event that I felt obligated to attend, and hoped for the best. I have this problem with people wanting to bond with me......but I am unable to bond with them. Since I have the good fortune of being around people who want to talk to me and get to know me - I would like to see if I can shift this situation for the better.

If I revisit in my mind hanging out with friends, back when I had friends.....I wasn't anxious at all, and we could have hung out forever. I'm trying to understand what the difference is between then and now. One obvious one is that we shared more back then - I currently don't feel I share as much with the people available to me as friends - I come from such a different place. But I'm thinking there are many magical elements that came together for me to feel at home with friends once in my life.

 

[Judge]

Never really counted the hours. Let's just say that when it was all over and done with, for better or worse I'd be at home with a nasty tension headache after the fact. Even in a positive social gathering it would still wear me out.

 

[QuiteOdd]

Just wondering what everyone's limit is with socializing! Is it easy for you or hard? Does alcohol make it easier? Do you prefer to get lost in crowds or do you prefer small gatherings?

Most of the socializing I do is around adults that are drinking. I don't drink much, so the more they drink, the quicker I leave because things get loud quick. If I have a glass of wine, I can hang a bit longer. But I would say 1.5-2.5 hours and not very often. I also can hang longer if there is less people.

It usually isn't up to me, bc I go to social gatherings with friends or family. So I usually have to stay there for as long as everybody else wants to.
I would say about 2 hours of a gathering where I know everyone, and then I start getting restless and need to be by myself. I can do longer if I'm allowed to just sit there and not interact.
If it's with mostly strangers, I'm already off to a bad start, so maybe 30 minutes .