When he confides in her about Sarah, the girl he likes, a fragile connection sparks—one marked by his unexpected request for her simple dolphin necklace. What seemed like a casual refusal now hangs heavy, revealing the silent complexities of a bond neither fully embraces nor completely rejects.
I am 16F and I have a neighbour, Ben, who is 16M. He is an autistic person. He is high functioning but sometimes prone to severe meltdowns.
Our mothers are friends, so we hang around a lot. We are friends and hang out a lot together but I don’t consider him close to me. It’s because it’s a pretty one sided friendship. If you asked him a single question about me, he wouldn’t be able to answer.
But he is fun to play video games with.
Few weeks ago, when he was over, he said that there was a girl he liked (Sarah). He said that he wanted to plan something incredible to ask her out. He was telling me some ideas and I was giving my opinions.
Suddenly, he said that he wanted my necklace to give to her. The necklace isn’t something special or with a great memory. It’s silver and has a dolphin pendant which I got on a vacation.
But I have been wearing it for a long time. I scoffed and said “Yeah, right”. He started telling other ideas and didn’t mention that one again.
The problem is that he is sometimes very bad at social cues and sarcasm. He genuinely thought that I had agreed to it. And since he never mentioned it again, I didn’t realise it too.
Few days later, he came to my house and asked for the necklace and I refused trying to explain that I was just being sarcastic. He ended up having a great meltdown right in my loving room and I still refused.
This became a big issue and everyone thinks that I should give him the necklace as I “technically” agreed.
My mom forced me to give the necklace to him and ever since then, I have completely stopped talking to him and lock myself in my room whenever they come over. Yesterday, some of my friends were already over when they came over and I refused to let him into my room.
In the past, I have always made an effort to include him but this time I didn’t bother.
My mom and his mom are again angry at me because I am his only friend and they feel I am hurting him and that I am jeopardizing his mental health.
Conclusion
The user, a 16-year-old girl, is caught in a difficult situation stemming from a misunderstood request for a personal item. She initially dismissed her autistic neighbor’s request for her necklace as a joke, but he interpreted it as a genuine agreement. This conflict escalated when she refused to hand it over, leading to a public meltdown and pressure from both families who believe she should comply due to the initial, albeit sarcastic, agreement.
Was the user wrong to refuse to give away a personal item, even if the agreement was based on a severe miscommunication rooted in her friend’s autism, or were the parents justified in forcing compliance to protect the neighbor’s emotional stability? Where does personal ownership end and social responsibility to accommodate a friend’s disability begin?
Here’s how people reacted:
His mother is raising him to be an asshole. It’s her job to make sure that he learns from situations like this that you communicated clearly and he misunderstood. Instead she’s training him to bully and to steal instead of to learn aspects of human communication that he hasn’t yet.
Your mother is siding with a bully mother and the child she is training to be an asshole instead of her own unoffending child.
I’m impressed at how you’ve handled this situation — you told the truth and stuck to it. And now that you know you can’t trust any of these people, you’re cutting off contact with the person they’re trying to make sure is an abusive asshole specifically towards you. It is the right and only safe thing to do.
Show this to your mother. She should be ashamed of herself. Ask her this–if he asks to be physical with you, and you’re so shocked by the question that you mutter, “Yeah, right,” and get out of there, is she going to force you to be handed over to be sexually assaulted too? Because they just taught him to look at your body and see things he can take.
Edit: Also ask your mother how that poor girl is supposed to feel when he tries to give her a necklace that is clearly stolen from you, since you have a history of wearing it? Your mother and his mother apparently see all young girls as things for him to make feel like crap so he can feel good about himself — they’re training him to be a monster instead of helping him to learn social skills.
Edit2: DO NOT listen to any of this garbage about how you should control your speech perfectly and still caretake this guy. It is absolutely fine for people to respond with shock to an invasive and shocking request that should never be made. No one is required to have their immediate response to an invasive and shocking request, like asking for a necklace you wear often, be perfect in its convenience for the person behaving badly.
You’re a growing kid too with your own brain growth and development to get on with, and sarcasm and ironic inflection is part of getting that done at your age, as is not having the same control over not using it that an adult over 25 would have. If people want caretakers for him who never use that kind of speech, they can hire people trained for it.
Edit3: From the sound of it, he did not have a meltdown due to autism in your living room. He had a temper tantrum because his mother trained him to believe he gets anything he wants if he throws a screaming fit. Temper tantrums are not meltdowns. Edit again — it was a real meltdown, OP says, see in her comment below. That makes this all the more heartbreaking for how the adults in this situation are screwing this boy over instead of helping him.
Edit5: This comment from OP shows that he was very clear, when calm, that he was stealing from her and that stealing from her was what he wanted to do. He’s an asshole.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/j8kyp2/aita\_for\_refusing\_to\_fulfill\_a\_promise\_i\_made\_to/g8cs83e/?context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/j8kyp2/aita_for_refusing_to_fulfill_a_promise_i_made_to/g8cs83e/?context=3)
Edit6: I can’t believe this still needs saying, but people keep commenting that OP should contact Ben in whatever warm fuzzy way they can think of. No, she should not. Ben has proven he will turn some random comment into “YOU OWE ME I CAN COMPEL YOU AND YOU HAVE NO CHOICE”. So it is not safe for OP to have any contact in any form with Ben at all.
Edit7: Ben should not be looking to get other people’s belongings in the first place. If he had been taught the basic principle we teach small children not to react with entitlement and greed to other people’s things, none of this would have happened. Instead he’s so entitled he formulates entire involved plans based on taking other people’s things to the point he has meltdowns when he doesn’t get to do that, and makes coldly calculated decisions to steal. The fix here isn’t “no sarcasm”, as some people seem to think, it’s “stop being absurdly greedy”.
The commenter who said (paraphrasing), “This doesn’t look like an autism problem; it looks like a family of greedy assholes problem,” really nailed it. OP lives next door to a family of people who think using her as an unpaid caregiver/service provider and stealing her possessions is fine and dandy. That is the problem. Autism isn’t.
I am getting better at when someone is joking and now if someone had said “yea right” I would have been able to determine they where just being sarcastic and didn’t mean it. However at nineteen I would have very likely taken them seriously and yes, I would have likely melted down after because I am big into routines and planning and would have already been planning on having the necklace and then suddenly having it taken away would have made me break down, especially at that age.
With my autism at (edit sorry, sixteen non nineteen) I was still functioning years behind socially and emotionally. Even though my intelligence was completely normal, it was more like I was eight or nine at that age emotionally and although I have progressed and gotten better I am still nowhere near where I should be for my age. I likely would not have had a meltdown but even now when things proposed don’t happen or when plans fall trough it is very hard for me to deal. As I said, when I make plans or someone says something I already start planning and focusing on the event and what I am going to do and anticipating it and then when it doesn’t happen it feels like someone has kicked the rug out from under me.
That being said you are not an AH for not giving him the necklace nor should anyone be pressuring you. You should have just explained about sarcasm to him and said you will try and be better at explaining yourself more clearly in the future. His mother should have always explained that to him.
You’ve also learned something valuable about your mother and how trustworthy she is when it comes to your interests vs. her social standing with her peers. She has demonstrated she won’t always have your back if it means that she’ll have to be uncomfortable or take a stand against another adult. This is important information for you to have about what you can expect from her; remember this in the future.
Edited to add: I suspect this situation *will* probably end with you getting your necklace back, one way or another. If you explain the situation to Sarah, she’ll probably give you back your necklace (and be extremely weirded out by the whole thing). But I think it’s probably still a good idea to not hang out with this boy anymore, since you now know the adults involved in this situation will not allow you to set normal, healthy boundaries with him. This isn’t a safe friendship for you to maintain, given the circumstances.
This is a concerning pattern of behaviour that will only teach your friend that by applying enough pressure on someone, by having a meltdown, he can get exactly what he wants consequence-free and that is a particularly bad pattern when applied to any relationship dynamic and will lead to unequal, unbalanced and unhealthy ones. What happens when a girl he likes rebuffs him? Will he know to take no for an answer? Or will he have a meltdown to get what he wants?
The adults in this situation have failed you both. Don’t listen to any pressure from them. You are right. He is wrong. His mother is setting him up to fail in any environment where she is not there to facilitate for him. He needs to learn and develop healthier coping mechanisms. You did the right thing by explaining the misunderstanding. His mother should have used it was a teaching moment but she didn’t. Never let anyone guilt you into keeping a relationship going when circumstances have changed and it no longer makes you feel comfortable. If you’ve already said this isn’t a real friendship, he doesn’t know (or care) about you as a person and this is reason enough to end a friendship. He was fun to play games with, it isn’t fun anymore.
NTA.
That being said, once the issue is done, I do think it is a bit harsh to hold onto a grudge about the situation aimed at him personally. By all means be annoyed at the position the parents took, but it is not actually his fault that he misunderstood what you meant about the necklace to begin with. It is also not his fault that he is being raised in an environment where he is conditioned to expect to be pandered to. I can understand why the issue would still upset you but I would try to include him again even if it’s just low-key rather than locking him out of your room.
Those saying his meltdown was just a temper tantrum clearly don’t understand autism and they don’t seem to want to try to.
That said, you were under no obligation to give him your necklace and the fact that your mother made you do so is insane. Your mother and her friend are absolutely TA in this situation.
What about the burden of explaining things to him? What about the pressure of being his only friend? What about you having to deal with the guilt trip and the anger from your mother and his because you are (rightly) unhappy about parting with a necklace you are fond of?
Is your mother or his volunteering to buy you a new necklace? Neither? I thought so.
Where do they allow you to draw the line? You’re not allowed to be sarcastic, they don’t want you to be angry with him, they want you to suffer in silence and give him his own way. They don’t want you distancing yourself from him.
I think you need to take a step back from the friendship. It has the potential to cause you hurt in the short term. (Plus I fear if the young man were to lay hands on you it would go unreported).
On the other hand, they had no right to force you to give your necklace up and your mom has no sense of boundaries, nor does his mom. They should have used that as a learning experience for everyone.
Tldr: you knowingly put yourself in a bad spot by not choosing your words better but the adults here were useless
someone’s parents should have said that they can buy something similar or exactly the same necklace instead but they decided to force you to give it to him and now they’re mad that you don’t want to be friends with someone after?
An autistic person not understanding social cues is an opportunity for their parents/guardian to inform them of the situation. It’s not an opportunity to allow them to believe something that did not happen.
I actually can’t believe your mother made you give him the necklace. What sort of injustice is that? Is she going to demand that you give him your video games next time he misunderstands your sarcasm?
His mom’s coddling is going to be a huge issue for him in the future. She should’ve handled it by explaining to him what you really meant.