It didn’t happen naturally either. Thanks trauma and social ostricisation for making me hyper vigilant.

Go easy on yourself :) . It’s a spectrum some people are able to some struggle. Personally I am rather good at it. Might miss some ideological nuance but have learnt to trust the vibe with people who I sense are disingenuous.

Neurotypically, yes. Think this is more an autistic joke. We have a tendency to see things happen before most people do. It gets fun when you know someone isn’t a safe person within 5 min of meeting them, but it takes everyone else a good year or so to realise. Issue is that you sound like an arsehole until the issues are manifested in a non subtle manner. How that ties into pattern recognition is that to survive possible dangers in social interactions, you begin to pick up subtle cues as abusers follow a pattern.

I didn’t want to

Asd diagnosis might help a few things here. Seems like you might have a bit of difficulty being able to express your emotions appropriately. I get it, I just got out of a relationship and it’s daunting to be on your own. And to do it for any extended period of time is not a good place to be. People need to have people they love trust and feel that in return. My advice is always practice honesty and vulnerability. Never put yourself in danger but be honest (not creepy) with your intentions and accepting rejection as a possibility is something that will happen but maybe you can talk to your professional support network about it and work on that rejection fear.

Yeah patriarchy is a system and it poisons us all. Never stop being open to being vulnerable. It’s just unfortunate that some view it as weakness.