Am I Lonely —
free, 15 questions
Loneliness is not the same as being alone — most of the worst of it happens in company. Fifteen questions about the last month, across how much contact there was, whether anyone knew what was going on, and whether there was anywhere you fit.
Classic Quiz
15 quick questions · 3 min
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The science behind it
Loneliness is not a count of the people around you. The definition the research has used since the 1970s is a gap — the distance between the connection you have and the connection you want — which is why it can be measured at all, and why someone with a full calendar can score high while someone who lives alone by choice scores low. Robert Weiss's distinction, which the facets here follow, separated two kinds that people experience quite differently: social loneliness, the absence of a network or a place to belong, and emotional loneliness, the absence of anyone who knows what is actually happening to you. The two do not substitute for one another. Somebody can be surrounded and emotionally lonely, and no quantity of the first will fix the second. Two further findings shape what the results say. The first is that sustained loneliness alters perception: it tilts the reading of ambiguous social signals toward rejection, which produces withdrawal, which produces more loneliness — a loop that keeps itself running and does not resolve on its own. The second is that long-term loneliness tracks physical health outcomes at a size that surprised the teams who first measured it, which is the reason to take it seriously rather than a reason to be frightened. Fifteen items written for MoodyWonder, over the last month, across three facets: how much contact there was, whether anyone knew what was going on, and whether there was anywhere you fit. This is not the UCLA Loneliness Scale or the De Jong Gierveld scale and does not claim to be, and loneliness is not a diagnosis — there is nothing here to be diagnosed with. Read the full methodology →
This is a screening-style questionnaire, not a diagnosis. It reads how often certain experiences happen to you and compares that with other people; only a clinician can assess what it means for you. If the result worries you, take it to one.
What you get — free
- ✓Your three facet scores against other people's — how much contact there was, how much of it involved being known, and whether there is anywhere you fit
- ✓Why the loneliest places are usually full of people, and which bar to read once you know that
- ✓The way out, which is not meeting more people — and the specific thing to do instead, with somebody you already know
A sample from Attachment Style — the layout is the same for every test.
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Common questions
I have friends and I still feel like this. Does that mean the test does not apply to me?
It means the opposite, and this is the single most common reason people close a page like this one before finishing it. Loneliness is not a count of the people in your life. It is the gap between the connection you have and the connection you need, and the most painful version of it happens in company rather than away from it — in a crowded room, inside a relationship that is not going badly, in an office where somebody greets you every morning by name. What produces it is not absence. It is being present with people who do not know what is actually going on with you, which is a specific and quite unpleasant experience, and it is worse than being by yourself because it comes with evidence that connection is available and none of it is reaching you. That is why this test separates how much contact you had from whether anyone knew anything. A person can be at the top of the first and the bottom of the second, and if that is you, the friends are real, the loneliness is real, and the two facts are not in conflict.
Is this just being an introvert, or liking my own company?
No, and the difference is whether it was chosen. Solitude is time by yourself that you wanted, and it restores people — introverts more than most, which is why they seek it out and why an evening alone can be the best part of somebody's week. Loneliness is a shortfall you did not choose and cannot end at will. They are not two points on one line: they can occur in the same hour, and a person can be perfectly happy in their own flat on Tuesday and unbearably lonely at a party on Friday. If you read the questions here and your honest reaction was that most of this suits you fine, then it suits you fine, and a low score is a low score rather than a failure to notice something. The item to pay attention to either way is not how many hours you spent alone. It is whether there was anyone who knew what the month had actually been like.
Can this diagnose anything?
There is nothing here to diagnose. Loneliness is not a disorder and there is no condition on the other side of this result — it is a description of a situation, over one month, compared with what other people report. What is worth knowing is that loneliness and depression overlap heavily, feed each other in both directions, and are regularly mistaken for one another, so a high score is a reasonable thing to mention to a doctor if it has come with persistent low mood, a loss of interest in things you used to want, or sleep that has changed. And separately from the score: if any of this has come with thoughts of not wanting to be here, that is a conversation to have today rather than a result to read — a crisis line, a doctor, someone you trust.
Why would meeting more people not fix it?
Because it tops up the wrong facet. New contact adds quantity, and quantity is what most people scoring high here already have enough of — what is missing is depth, and depth does not arrive by adding names. It arrives by saying one more true thing inside a relationship that already exists. This is counterintuitive and it is also, mechanically, why the obvious plan keeps failing: somebody joins a class, meets eleven pleasant strangers, has eleven more pleasant conversations that go no further than the ones they were already having, and concludes that they are the problem. They are not. They corrected a shortage they did not have. The move that works is smaller and much less appealing: with one person who already knows you, replace one "fine" with something that is actually true. That is the whole mechanism — being known is produced by disclosure and by nothing else — and it is available tonight without meeting anybody.
I have just moved, or just come out of a relationship, or just lost somebody. Does that count?
It counts, and it is worth naming as its own thing, because people in these situations are the most likely to read a high score as a verdict on themselves. Moving cities, a break-up, bereavement, a new job, retirement, a first baby — every one of these is a period where the ordinary machinery of connection stops working for a while, and loneliness during them is a feature of the situation and not a fact about you. Retirement removes about thirty hours a week of unplanned contact nobody had to arrange. A new baby produces isolation that is genuinely surprising to the people in it, given that they are never alone. In all of them the score is high for reasons that are completely legible, it usually improves as the new pattern settles, and the same actions help — with the one adjustment that during these periods you have to arrange on purpose what used to happen by itself.
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