“It’s all made up.”įor years I had convinced myself that my failure to obtain a boyfriend was mathematical - too few parties attended, too few men befriended, too little time dedicated to Tinder. In the comments of my quizzes people would affirm their results as if they were scientifically proven: “Omg this is so me!” My quizzes might ask, “Which One Direction member is your soul mate?” or “What type of ghost would you be?” But I already knew what I wanted those answers to be, and my quizzes simply bore them out. In designing quizzes, I could elect myself the most well liked, brilliant, hilarious, hottest and most likely to succeed. But quiz making was also empowering, meaning it made me feel like God.įinally, I had the answers I wanted because I wrote them myself. Quiz making was a relatively tedious process, especially then, when the content management system was buggy and public interest modest. Throughout, I worked at BuzzFeed, making quizzes. I vented to my therapist, and dumped my therapist, and then got my new therapist all caught up. I attributed my dating failures to generic incompatibility and the inestimable shortcomings of the male sex. I moved to New York, where I dated one man for a few weeks before he dumped me, and then repeated that scenario with another man. And I figured that if I were anything but straight - anything but “normal” - I would have known when I was much younger. But no result ever felt true enough for me to stop taking quizzes.Įventually, I gave up. If I took a quiz wanting to be told I was gay or bisexual, that would be the conclusion. If I took a quiz seeking reassurance I was straight, I would get it. I remember knowing what the answer would be before finishing every quiz it was always exactly what I wanted it to be.
I remember politically incorrect and leading questions, such as “When you think about the type of person you want to marry, do they have short hair, like a man, or long hair, like a woman?” One quiz took my lack of interest in driving a pickup truck as definitive evidence that I was not, in fact, a lesbian. But when I first looked, in 2010, desperate for answers to my perpetual singlehood, online quizzes were still surprisingly amateurish, often using irregular font sizes and clip art. The selection of sexuality quizzes available on today’s internet is vast. In retrospect, maybe I should have known who I was the first time I went looking for a quiz called “Am I gay?” But I didn’t. The older I got, the less confident I felt in how well I knew myself, and the more I looked outward for anything that might provide clues. (extremely popular) and he was nice about it, but it was humiliating for us both.Ĭollege graduation is the natural end of most people’s association with the multiple-choice quiz, but I couldn’t stop taking them. My habit started in middle school, in the backs of magazines like CosmoGirl and Seventeen and Teen Vogue, where short quizzes promised girls guidance on issues ranging from “Does he like you?” to “How much does he like you?” Each Valentine’s Day in high school, our first-period teachers would pass out Scantron forms for a service called CompuDate, which promised to match each hormonal teenager with her most compatible classmate of the opposite sex, without regard for the social consequences. When they weren’t available or got sick of me, I turned to another lifelong source of support and comfort: the multiple-choice quiz. I knew I was doing something wrong but didn’t know what.
I’d never had a boyfriend or even slept with a man, and I didn’t particularly like going on dates with men or hanging out with them, but I thought that was normal - all of my friends constantly complained about the guys they were dating. Until then, I had assumed I was straight I was just really, really bad at it. I was excited to meet her, but it was all happening so fast (if you don’t include the 28 confused years preceding it). I had sent Lydia the first message, asking to read the gay Harry Potter fanfic she had mentioned in her profile. It would be my first-ever date with a woman, made approximately 10 days after I came out to friends as “not straight, but I’ll get back to you on exactly how much” at the age of 28. Our first date was for drinks on a Monday night after a workday I had spent trying not to throw up from anxiety. Lydia and I met thanks to a quiz, the multiple-choice OkCupid personality assessment, which asks for your thoughts on matters like “Would a nuclear Holocaust be exciting?” (that’s a “no” from me) and then matches you with those you’re least likely to hate.