It's less about being able to make a lot of friends or forcing oneself to be social and much more about being able to calibrate how you're coming off to others and head misperceptions off at the pass.

Quoting from this wikipedia article on autism spectrum disorders.

Two traits sometimes found in AS individuals are mind-blindness (the inability to predict the beliefs and intentions of others) and alexithymia (the inability to identify and interpret emotional signals in oneself or others), which reduce the ability to be empathetically attuned to others.[32][33] Alexithymia in AS functions as an independent variable relying on different neural networks than those implicated in theory of mind.[32][33] In fact, lack of Theory of Mind in AS may be a result of a lack of information available to the mind due to the operation of the alexithymic deficit.[32][33

Edit: Btw, you aren't in eastern Tennessee by chance are you?