I'm not sure if I'm autistic, allistic, or what. However, I recently had a wonderful person move in who is autistic. I find the conversations in person often more difficult and draining than over text. In text there was much more room for me to share my thoughts and ideas, and they'd respond to them.

In person it's a lot of info dumping, repeating themselves, and staying on topics I've shown no interest in until I point-blank ask them to move on. This is completely unlike the text behavior, where topics moved naturally according to both our interests not just theirs, and there was space for my thoughts and input in the conversation.

It seems like the medium of text smoothed out a lot of this. Maybe the higher effort of typing reduced the rate of info dumping, and the asynchronous nature means they can take up as much or as little screen space as they want without crowding me out of the conversation.

I'm getting better at just saying "I need to be done talking about this now", but that only addresses part of it, and getting to the point where I just have to terminate the line of conversation feels bad. They react okay, but I can tell it's not a great experience for them either.

Also, the topics I'm interested in just don't get much air time unless I'm really forcing it, saying things like "I want to finish my point" and "before we move on". It makes me feel forceful and demanding, and it's emotionally draining.

I know from texting and conversations with them that they are interested in my perspective and enjoy conversation where I take a similar amount of conversational space. It's just that the mechanics of the in-person conversation aren't allowing for it.

So how can I do this in-person thing better without feeling emotionally drained and frustrated, and it still be good for them?