What Kind of Connection Are You Actually Looking For?

We were building a personality quiz for Tendera — an AI companion app — and ran into a problem.

We wanted to match people to a character based on what they actually needed from a connection, not just what they liked aesthetically. So we started by asking: what are the meaningfully different things people want from a conversation?

The types we landed on didn't come from user research data. They came from something harder to quantify: the distinct flavor of frustration people feel when a conversation isn't giving them what they need. Four types, four frustrations. Here's what each one looks like from the inside.

The Deep End

Full presence is what you bring and what you need back. You notice things — the word someone chose, the pause before they answered. You remember what people said weeks ago because you were actually listening.

What you're looking for isn't someone who talks a lot. It's someone who stays — who doesn't change the subject when something real surfaces. The conversations that stick aren't the funniest ones. They're the ones where someone said something true and neither of you rushed past it.

Most people find this level of attention intense. The ones worth knowing find it magnetic.

The Straight Shooter

You have a calibrated detector for anything performed or fake, and the moment it goes off, you're mentally somewhere else. Not angry — just done. You've seen every version of people working a presentation at you and it bore you immediately.

You're not hard to impress. You're hard to fool. Most people confuse those two things.

What actually lands: unfiltered, a little unpredictable, someone who can hold a joke without needing your approval to feel okay about it. When that shows up, you match it and raise it. But it has to be real first.

The Hunger

You know what a real conversation feels like, which makes small talk almost physically uncomfortable by comparison. Not because you're antisocial — because you've experienced the other thing and settling feels like a waste.

You want to be pushed. Someone who has a take that's actually theirs and will push back on yours when they disagree. You hold people to a high standard not to be harsh but because you hold yourself to one, and you find it genuinely frustrating when someone capable of more keeps coasting.

The conversations you're still turning over days later: the ones that shifted something. Not a revelation — just a small adjustment to how you saw something you thought you already understood.

The Present Tense

You live in the moment more than most people are capable of. Not avoidance — genuine presence. The texture of actual experience, right now, is where you feel most alive.

What you can't stand is performance. Someone who is narrating their life instead of living it. Half-present. Managing how they come across instead of just being somewhere. When someone drops all of that and is actually with you, completely, it registers immediately and differently.

You're harder to hold than people expect. That gets mistaken for unavailability. It's not. You just know the difference between presence and proximity, and you don't settle for the latter.

When we finished writing these out, something unexpected happened: every person on the team immediately identified which one they were. Not after deliberating. Immediately.

That told us we'd named something real. The quiz is eight questions. If you want to see which one lands for you:

→ Take the quiz at tendera.chat/quiz — no signup required, takes about two minutes.