When did you last audit your friendships?
Not a cull. An honest look at who's actually in your life.
Start the quiz →What this quiz explores
Adult friendship runs on nobody's schedule, which is why it erodes without anyone deciding it should. This looks at the shape of your friendships rather than the number: how deep they go, who's doing the maintenance, and what happened to the ones that faded.
How it works
The quiz has 4 possible results. Each answer option was written to lean toward one of them.
Your result is the one your answers pointed to most often. Skipped questions, and the occasional answer that does not lean toward any result, are not counted.
Alongside the result you see your answer profile: the share of your answers that pointed to each result. Close percentages mean you sit between two results, which is common.
Four friendship shapes
The Deep Few
Two or three people know everything, which is what the research says matters, so the number is not your problem.
You have a small circle and it's real. Someone hears about a bad thing within the hour, the reciprocity is balanced, and you'd rather one long conversation than five short ones. The long-running work on adult wellbeing keeps landing on the same finding, which is that a small number of close relationships predicts more than breadth does, and you have those. The trap is concentration. Two or three people is a resilient structure until one moves abroad, has a baby, or goes through something that takes them out of circulation for two years, and deep circles have no bench. The related risk is that you've probably stopped forming new friendships, since the existing ones meet the need and new ones take an unglamorous amount of repeated contact to develop. Add one loose tie without trying to replicate what you have. A recurring activity with people you don't know well does the job, because unplanned repeated contact is how adult friendships form and it removes the need to organize anything. Separately, check whether your closest people have circles of their own, since a friend who relies solely on you is in the same position you'd be in if you lost them.
The Wide Net
You know a lot of people and you can feel alone in a full room, which is the specific cost of breadth.
Your calendar has people in it, your group chats are numerous, and you'd happily go to an acquaintance's birthday drinks. Breadth is worth having: it brings opportunities, information, and a life that rarely feels empty. What it doesn't reliably bring is someone who knows what's currently happening to you in any detail. The trap is that depth requires the thing breadth costs, which is repeat time with the same person. Wide Nets tend to spread the same number of hours across thirty people, so every relationship stays at the headline level, and difficult news comes out over weeks rather than the same evening. Loneliness in a crowd is a real and specific experience, and it's the one this shape produces. Choose two or three people and overweight them deliberately for six months. Same people, more often, longer conversations, and tell one of them something before you've finished processing it, since disclosure is what converts an acquaintance into a friend. The wide net keeps working in the background. It's the concentrated hours that build the thing you're missing.
Organizer
Your social life exists because you build it every week, and the resentment underneath is worth taking seriously.
You make the plan, you send the message, you book the table. Things happen because you make them happen, and if you stopped it would go quiet within a month. You're the one asking how people are, you're rarely the one being asked, and being the person who needs something is uncomfortable in a way you may not have examined.
Drifted
Life happened, the friendships thinned, and nothing about that is a verdict on you.
Work, a move, children, a breakup, or the slow disappearance of the conditions that used to make it easy. The friends who came with a job left with it, the group chats went quiet, and the last long conversation is hard to date. You may have friendships you'd still call close that you haven't spoken to in eight months, and reaching out now feels awkward in proportion to the silence. The trap is the story about lateness. Almost nobody is offended by a message after a long gap, and almost everybody assumes the other person let it lapse; both of you are waiting on the same doorstep. The other trap is aiming too high, since trying to rebuild a full social life at once is exhausting and the failure confirms the wrong conclusion. Send one message this week to one specific person, and don't explain the gap. Something small and particular works better than an apology. Then get one recurring thing in the diary that you don't have to organize, a class, a team, a regular anything, since repeated unplanned contact is how friendship forms and it's the ingredient adult life removes. Persistent loneliness is common and it responds to structure, and it's also worth mentioning to a doctor or therapist if it's been heavy for a while.
What this quiz can’t tell you
- It is a self-reflection exercise, not a validated psychometric test. It has not been normed against a population.
- It reports how you see yourself, which is not always how you behave. People who know you well might answer differently on your behalf.
- Results describe tendencies, not fixed traits. Most people recognise themselves in more than one result.
How this quiz was designed
Draws on research into adult friendship formation and the role of repeated unplanned contact, including the Harvard Adult Development Study's findings on relationships and long-term wellbeing.
Read more about how our quizzes are created, including how scoring works and what we do and do not claim.