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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. Why didn’t I ever think wanting it to be true was answer enough? Why did I imbue an amateurish, made-up, misspelled four-question quiz with more authority than I granted myself? I took all those quizzes hoping to be told I was gay and feeling let down whenever the answer came back that I wasn’t. On and off throughout my 20s I had wished I were gay because then I would have an explanation for why men and me didn’t mix romantically. I didn’t know I could try something new before knowing I wanted it. “But that’s normal, right?”Īs it turns out, it really isn’t. “What do you feel when you imagine going on a first date with a man?” she said. It was my good, second therapist who helped me realize that my nonexistent love life was not a quantitative issue but a qualitative one. I assumed there was a right way to do things and I had yet to master it.
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“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.
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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.