Emotional Bids and Other Neurodivergent Learnings
Well, 2026 has just started and my autistic ass has already learned a few new social patterns. Had some truly surprising revelations and thought I’d share for fellow neurodivergents who also need to consciously and explicitly think about social conventions.
1. Emotional Bids
I was today years old when I learned that not everyone takes everything literally.
I know it sounds like a joke, but like, only a little bit.
I was in a conversation with a friend, and it got heated, and she said,
Don’t you remember X about me?
And I’m like no, I don’t remember X. But I do remember A, B, C, D, E, F, G.
And in my mind, that’s evidence, that’s me proving I did remember most of the stuff we talk about.
It may surprise you to learn that my brag about the capacity of my memory did not assuage her yelling at me; in fact it made it worse.
What I didn’t realize was that she wasn’t asking a factual question. She was making what’s called an emotional bid: a bid for affection, reassurance, alignment. What she was really asking was:
Do I matter to you?
And specifically the request is
I want to know that I do matter to you.
In that frame, whether I remembered X was essentially irrelevant.
My problem was that for me it felt like leaving a parenthesis open (. We didn’t “close the loop” insofar as answering the question directly.
Apparently for most people, the feeling is the question.
All I really had to say was to the effect of
Of course you matter to me.
The lesson reminds me of the saying that people don’t remember what you said, they remember how you made them feel.
2. Stop Weaponizing ‘Sorry’
Now that we’ve learned about emotional bids, it may be interesting to learn that saying sorry is often a specialized form of emotional bid.
I could write a whole separate piece on apologizing properly, and I probably will, but here’s the relevant portion.
People weaponize their apologies. Many apologize by asking for forgiveness.
I’m sorry.
I feel terrible.
I hope you can forgive me.
What’s actually happening is an emotional transfer. You’ve harmed someone, and now you’re asking them to relieve you of your guilt.
You’re asking for forgiveness, meaning you’re asking them to make you feel better.
Turning forgiveness into an obligation actually makes you the center of attention, rather than the person you are apologizing to. It shifts the emotional labor back onto the injured party.
The correct move is to flip the vector.
Instead of centering your guilt, center their cost.
A solid apology structure looks like:
-
Apologize.
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Acknowledge the impact.
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Express gratitude.
For example:
I am sorry. I can see how that put you in a bad position.
You didn’t deserve that.
I appreciate you trusting me enough to say something.
Remember that an apology is an acknowledgment of debt. We may feel guilty and anxious, but having harmed them, in that moment it is appropriate for us to take an L. Avoid asking for more in the form of forgiveness.
3. The Power of Leaving Things Unsaid
This one is adjacent, but it clicked the same week.
A lot of the time, the implication will do the work.
I had a friend who invited me to a party, where she had a comped table. Afterward, I thanked her and Venmoed her for the full tip.
She responded,
Oh, you didn’t need to Venmo the whole thing.
But she had invited us, got us a free table, which is obviously way more valuable than whatever the tip was. It occurred to me to point this out, but then from previous learnings I realized, perhaps I didn’t need to explicitly say it. In fact, I think narrating the ledger or making it seem I was anally tracking dollar amounts would be exactly the wrong signal to send.
I actually ran this by ChatGPT:
Well you got us the table, that’s way more impactful and you shouldn’t need to also provide the tip
but I was told this would have turned generosity into accounting.
Instead we workshopped it to just:
I appreciate you setting it up 🙏
The gesture carried the math without itemizing it.
I’ve learned that not everything needs to be spelled out. Not every asymmetry needs to be formally resolved in words. Sometimes making it explicit actually cheapens it.
There’s a kind of social over-optimization where I try to clarify everything, define everything, close every loop, but sometimes restraint preserves the meaning better than explanation. I’ve been working on recognizing when the signal has already landed.
The Metalearning
All three of these are versions of the same core mistake: conflating literal content with emotional subtext.
As a nerd, I kept optimizing for semantic accuracy when what mattered was affective resonance. I was answering the question that was asked when I should have been addressing the need underneath it.
For most neurotypical people, the subtext carries more signal than the text. The feeling is the message. And unlike in programming, where an unclosed parenthesis breaks everything, human communication has built-in fault tolerance. People can understand imperfectly-conveyed meaning as long as the emotional vector is right.
I’m still learning to recognize when the signal has already landed and I don’t need to keep explaining. When gratitude has been received. When the loop is closed even if the parenthesis isn’t.
It’s uncomfortable. It still feels incomplete sometimes. But I’m starting to see that in real life, over-specifying is often just anxiety masquerading as clarity.
So yeah. Hope my thoughts help my fellow autists survive 2026 a little better.
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