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How you get to know someone
Love personality test
How you go about it with someone you do not know.Eight scenes, from the first line to the first silence, and an avatar at the end.
8
questions
1
minute
80+
avatars
Eight questions, no overthinking. Ready?
Who writes what, after the first āhiā
The message that runs a little short, the question that lands, the silence left in place: everyone has a way, and each symbol keeps one. You will recognise one of them, or two.
No paper to hand in
A Persona puts eight situations to you, one after the other, and you answer the way you would with your phone in hand. Nobody marks it.
The card is yours. It stays in your space and only goes out if you share its private link.
Watch yourself at it
Eight moments, three answers each. You look for the one your hand would pick without you.
Pick the right test
First message, an evening for two, a disagreement. There is a test for each place where you hesitate.
Write the first word
Once the test is done, you can carry on with a Persona, at your own pace. Then comes the real first message, the one you will send to someone.
A hello, a silence, a one-word reply
A love personality test starts here at the first hello. It looks at what you show straight away, how you pick the conversation back up when it drags, what you do with a late and curt answer. It all happens fast, and often with nobody noticing.
A Persona gives you eight scenes, one after the other: a first message, a date that starts crooked, a lull that settles in. Answer with what you would really do, awkward or not. This free love test hands you a temperament family and an avatar in about a minute.
Three of the eight situations
These are the kinds of moments the Persona asks you about.
- A āhahaā for an answer, four hours later.
- An idea of a drink on Thursday, with no idea if the other person wants one.
- The pause in the middle of a first date, once the waiter has finished serving.
A love personality test for the first minutes, when the thumb hovers over send
A thumb over the send button, three dots that appear and vanish, a film the other person did not like. In those minutes most of us are busy with ourselves, with what we said and what we should have said. This love personality test looks at what your hand does with the wait, the lull and the curt word. The nine lines below are nine ways of resting a hand there.
Three lines and a question
The message goes out in three lines, with a question about the person across from you and nothing of what made you want to write. Light, easy to read with a distracted thumb. The rest waits, in drafts or elsewhere, for a minute nobody announced.
Ten minutes in, a whole week
Barely ten minutes after hello, someone asks what is weighing on you, and you answer for real. Work, tiredness, a memory coming back. A polite question has just received a whole week, and the other person decides what to do with it.
One word, three hours late
One word, after three hours. You put the phone down, tell yourself you are asking too much, and the small sting stays where it is. The thread picks up as if nothing happened, and what the word did to you travels in your pocket.
No time for the irritation to steep
A curt reply. Your remark leaves before any cushion has found its place, and the irritation lands on the table still warm. Twenty minutes of conversation can change tone on a sentence like that, in a direction no one knows yet.
When the thread goes thin
The messages space out and you send nothing to fill the gap. No courtesy āand how was your day?ā, no comment on the quiet. A silence stays a silence, and what follows gets written on a page you did not fill.
The dog, the cancelled trip
When the conversation sags, you already hold a question that picks up a detail given earlier, the dog, the cancelled trip. It is the follow-up Huang and colleagues describe. What remains is the gap, the kind a slow reply may ask for, and whether you leave it.
The conversation nobody had
Between the person who answers straight away and the one who makes you wait, you take the first, no regrets, a life being a crowded enough diary. The other stays a conversation never had, its shape anyoneās guess.
Message two, better built
A botched opening, a joke gone flat. Within the hour a second message goes out, better built, because you want what comes next. We have all written the three-line version and regretted the fourth. How many do you write before the first gets an answer?
A pencil line, colour pending
Two sentences about yourself, a laugh when you are teased, a nudge after a short lull. Every move is measured, none sticks out, and the evening slides along. What gets drawn of you this way fits on a sheet barely started.
Ten minutes with someone new, and we have already passed a verdict, on ourselves. The word too many, the late laugh, the remark about the rain. Altman and Taylor pictured an onion peeled layer by layer; a first message touches only the rind, which is its whole job. A love personality test that looks at those minutes has to start with that harsh judge.
Karen Huang and colleagues got strangers talking, online and then on speed dates, three studies in all. The people who asked follow-up questions, the kind that pick up what the other has just said, were better liked, and more often asked for a second date, which the study reads as a sign of liking and not as a promise of lasting. Participants, according to the abstract, did not see the effect coming.
Erica Boothby followed strangers in a lab, first-year students with their dorm mates, and the participants of a workshop. After the conversation, all of them thought they had pleased less than they had. The gap is called the liking gap, and among the dorm mates it was still measurable months later. The authors put it down partly to how hard we are on our own performance. What it becomes outside those three settings, nobody knows. Our eight situations came out of a notebook; no laboratory has seen them.
A few clarifications, before you redraft your message three times
Only the first few minutes
Courage, gentleness, friendliness and ambition, seen through eight first-meeting moments. It is a game, with no score and no scientific validation. The result tells you how you react in those moments and says nothing about the rest of your life.
Three answers, or your own words
Take the first reflex, the one that comes before the rewrite. No answer is a bad one, each is a way of getting to know someone.
What you get at the end
After the eighth answer, the Persona asks for your e-mail address before showing you your card. It then stays in your space, and you can share it with a private link.