Six excruciating minutes later, she texted me back. I texted her as soon as I was in my apartment. And when we said goodbye, tipsy and starving, both of us having been too nervous to acknowledge the human need for nourishment, I didn’t consult the internet about what the next move should be or who should make it. It was not my longest first date ever but by far my best. My first date with Lydia lasted four hours. And when, after a back-and-forth, she asked me out, I said yes - not because I thought I should, or because doing so was the first step on the correct path forward. When I saw someone I was drawn to, I did not study our compatibility, seeking out our mismatched traits.
Finally in the right dating pool, I used my old friend, the quiz, as a life vest. I joined OkCupid and answered the personality questions to the best of my ability.
Finally, at 28, I realized I could, if I wanted, be different from the person I had been told I was. Lost in the many hundreds of quizzes I had taken was the power of making my own choice. 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. 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.