Am I lonely? A quiz that separates the three things
Twelve questions on how often you see people, who actually knows you, and whether plans happen without you starting them. About two minutes. Nothing is saved.
Friendship quiz
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Why it scores three things and not one
Most quizzes on this give you a single number, which is the part that makes them useless. Loneliness is not one quantity. Three different shortages produce the same feeling, and they need different responses.
| What is short | What it feels like | What actually moves it |
|---|---|---|
| Frequency | Weeks pass. You are not upset with anyone, you just have not seen them. | A standing thing on a fixed day. Repetition, not better plans. |
| Depth | A full calendar and nobody who knows what is actually going on. | Answering one question more honestly than the conversation required. |
| Reciprocity | Everything happens because you organised it. Stop, and it stops. | Groups with their own momentum, so the plan does not depend on you. |
The reason this matters is that the standard advice, meet more people, only helps the first one. If your shortage is depth, meeting more people makes it worse: you add more relationships at the same shallow setting and end up busier and no less lonely.
Can you be lonely with plenty of friends?
Yes, and it is the most common version people do not expect. Loneliness tracks the depth and reliability of connection rather than the headcount. A person with somewhere to be every night and nobody who would notice a bad month is lonely by every measure that matters, and usually feels unreasonable for saying so.
It is also why the frequency score can be high while the total is low. Contact is not the same as being known.
What the research actually supports
Two findings hold up well enough to act on.
Repetition beats intensity. Closeness comes from unplanned, regular contact with the same people. This is why friendships form easily at school and rarely at thirty five: the structure did the work. A recurring low-effort thing outperforms a better idea that needs organising from scratch every time.
It takes longer than people expect. The commonly cited figure is roughly fifty hours of time together before someone counts as a casual friend, and a couple of hundred before they are a close one. Knowing the number is useful mostly as permission to stop concluding it is not working after three meetups.
We wrote more on both in how long it takes to make a friend.
Common questions
Is this a clinical test?
No. It is a structured self-assessment, not a diagnostic instrument, and it does not produce a score anyone should treat as a medical result. What it is genuinely useful for is separating three things that usually get felt as one, so you can tell which is actually short.
Is anything I answer saved or sent anywhere?
No. The quiz runs entirely in your browser. There is no account, no email, and this page carries no analytics. You can open your browser's network tab and watch while you use it. Reloading clears everything.
What if my score is low across all three?
Then start with frequency, even though depth is the one that sounds more important. Frequency is the only one of the three you can move on your own, and the other two tend to follow it. Depth needs someone to be there often enough to be honest with, and reciprocity needs a group that already exists.
How is this different from the friendship audit?
The friendship audit looks outward, one existing friendship at a time, and gives you a read on each. This looks at the overall shape and tells you which of the three shortages you have. If you already know who your people are and want to think about them individually, use the audit instead.