Perhaps this will be a helpful way of looking at the subject of rules.
On one of the autism sites on which I lurk, there is a thread hundreds of pages long discussing "unwritten social rules" that neurotypical people all seem to have picked up on, and will penalize you mercilessly if you violate them.
For example, there is no official rule against answering honestly and in excruciating detail when someone asks me about my plans for the weekend. However, the unofficial, unwritten rule is that I should keep my answer brief and uninformative, because the ugly fact is that most people who ask questions don't really care about the answer.
Such questions usually gets asked only because a lot of people feel uncomfortable standing next to another human being in silence, each thinking their own thoughts. "Doing anything special over the weekend?" is regarded as a good opening ambit for neurotypical people's favorite type of conversation--the vacuous, mindless kind that is not about the content at all, but about assessing whether the other party is making the right eye contact and facial expressions to successfully impersonate a "nice" human being. There's a whole non-verbal thing that's supposed to be going on simultaneously with the small talk, to strengthen the weak social bond between two people who barely know each other.
Or, in my case, between myself and someone I've sat next to in the church choir for twenty years, but for whom I have no glimmer of recognition whatsoever when I bump into them in the grocery store. (I'm so faceblind, I didn't even recognize myself when a picture of me and my daughters appeared in their school newspaper last month. I assumed that the adult in the photo was a teacher. And I only recognized one of my two daughters, before I read the picture's caption, because she has since changed her hairstyle. Yes, I really am that bad. And if I ever meet you in person, don't expect me to remember that we've ever met, if you walk away and come back a few minutes later.)
Anyway, the unwritten rule is to keep one's answer to small-talk questions as brief and uninformative as possible. Even a dishonest non-answer like "Oh, not too much" is preferable to an honest, lengthy reply. Because, besides providing ample opportunity for the other person to notice and dislike weird quirks, like my failure to fake good eye contact and appropriate facial expressions...the fact that my actual weekend plans involve nerdy obsessions with niche subjects is not going to go over well, either.
It would therefore seem counterintuitive for someone like me to prolong the conversation by asking them about their weekend plans. Oh, no. How wrong that would be. (Has been.)
See, there's an even more important unwritten rule: No one really cares about the minutia of anyone else's daily life--how they're doing, how they'll be spending the weekend--but they care immensely about anything relating to their own wonderful selves. So questions of this sort must always, always be reciprocated. Always. However little they care about my weekend plans and however little I care about theirs...if someone asks me about mine and I fail to ask about their plans in return, it's the end of the friggin' world, socially.
A lot of life has unwritten social rules like that. Unfortunately, the only way to find out what they are is to break them, and then try to figure out what went wrong.
And, yes, sometimes other people seem to be able to break the exact same rule in the exact same way, and somehow get away with it, due to another whole layer of unwritten rules about who is allowed to break certain rules, and under which circumstances.
It's all very mystifying, and unfair, and frustrating. But that's life in this social species. Even neurotypical people can't figure it out a lot of the time.
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