Friendship Profile · 24 Questions · 5 Minutes · Free
A 6-axis assessment of how you actually show up in friendships.
Friendships rarely die from one big thing. They drift, fade, get lopsided, run out of fuel. Most of those failure modes are downstream of one specific thing — mode mismatch. How you show up. How the friend on the other end shows up. Whether the modes complement each other or accidentally cancel out.
Click Begin the Test below. Answer for the friend you actually are across most of your friendships — not the one you wish you were, and not the one you are with one specific best friend.
A 5-minute relational profile
The Friendship Archetype Test
Friendships rarely die from one big thing — they drift, fade, get lopsided, run out of fuel. Most of that is downstream of mode mismatch: how you show up, and how the friend on the other end shows up. This test maps which of six friendship modes is loudest in you.
Educational tool grounded in relational psychology and sociology of friendship. Not a clinical instrument. Friendship archetypes are not character — they're modes you can shift between, and most people are already shifting between them more than they realize.
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Your Friendship Profile
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Relational Voltage · 0%
Your Friendship Map
Each axis is one mode of how you show up in friendships. The further from center, the louder that mode runs in your relational life.
Your Two Loudest Modes
What each of your two strongest modes gives to friends, what it costs you, and the calibrating moves for both.
Want to see what each mode means before you start? Read the six modes · See the eight profiles
The Six Modes, Briefly
These are drawn from contemporary work on friendship typology in social psychology and sociology — including Robin Dunbar’s research on friendship structure, William Rawlins on the dialectics of friendship, and the practical literature on how adults actually maintain (or fail to maintain) close ties across the second half of life. They are not personality types. They are modes — and most people are already shifting between them more than they realize.
The Anchor
Steady presence, the one who stays
The friend who stays. Reliable across decades. Shows up for the unglamorous moments — birthdays, hard weeks, ordinary check-ins — that hold friendships together more than the dramatic ones do. Anchors are who friendships get measured against; their absence registers as a particular kind of loss.
In the wildBeing the friend who’s still calling years after a friend’s parent died — long after most other people have stopped, and when it still matters most.
The Spark
Energy, novelty, the initiator
The friend who initiates. Brings the plan, the trip, the unexpected place, the new idea, the energy. Friendships with sparks are richer than they would have been otherwise — and sparks pay for that richness in invisible work the rest of the friendship rarely sees.
In the wildBeing the one in a friend group who sends the message that becomes the trip everyone remembers ten years later — and noticing, sometimes, that you’re always that one.
The Mirror
Empathic listener, holds the space
The friend who listens fully. Friends come not to be fixed but to be heard, and being heard fully — without advice, without redirection, without the listener’s discomfort filling the space — is rarer than people realize.
In the wildA friend telling you something they haven’t told anyone — and you understanding that they’re telling you specifically because of how you’ll listen, not because of what you’ll say.
The Mentor
Pushes growth, tells the hard truth
The friend who tells the hard truth. Productive friction in service of who the friend is becoming. Will say the thing that costs warmth in the moment, because the friendship is built on long-arc growth, not short-arc comfort.
In the wildBeing the friend who said this relationship isn’t good for you two years before the friend was ready to hear it — and being thanked for it five years later, when they finally were.
The Drifter
Loose, intermittent, intense when present
The friend who doesn’t run regular contact. Friendships pick up where they left off after months or years, and the looseness is genuinely comfortable on your side. You show up intensely when you do; you disappear gracefully when you don’t.
In the wildGoing eight months without speaking to a friend you genuinely love, picking up the conversation, and neither of you feeling the gap because the rhythm has always been like this.
The Guardian
Fierce loyalty, takes sides, protects
The friend who takes sides. Small circle, total protection. When someone messes with your people, you take it personally; when one of yours is wrong, you’ll say so privately while defending them publicly. Guardian friendships have a specific intensity that is part loyalty, part identity, part shield.
In the wildBecoming irrationally angry on a friend’s behalf when someone treats them poorly — and recognizing later that the anger was bigger than the actual offense, because the offense was against your people.
The Eight Profiles
Most profiles resolve to one of six dominant-mode archetypes. Two further results — The Versatile Friend and The Many-Friended — are reserved for unusually balanced or unusually multi-mode profiles.
The Anchor
Steady, reliable, the one who stays.
Anchor dominant. The friend others count on across decades. The fix is rarely more reliability; it’s auditing which of your anchored friendships are reciprocal, and asking — explicitly — for what anchors usually under-ask for.
The Spark
Energy, novelty, the initiator.
Spark dominant. The friend who initiates. The fix is rarely less energy; it’s noticing when bringing the plan has become nobody else will if I don’t, and periodically not initiating to see who does.
The Mirror
Empathic listener, holds the space.
Mirror dominant. The friend who listens fully. The fix is rarely better listening; it’s making sure you have at least one friend capable of mirroring you — and using them when you need it, instead of always being the held one.
The Mentor
Pushes growth, tells the hard truth.
Mentor dominant. The friend who tells the hard truth. The fix is rarely fewer hard truths; it’s asking do you want my take, or do you want me to listen? before offering perspective — and respecting the answer.
The Drifter
Loose, intermittent, intense when present.
Drifter dominant. The friend with the comfortable looseness. The fix is rarely more contact; it’s distinguishing freedom-loving drift (a style) from avoidance drift (a wound) — and being honest about which is currently yours.
The Guardian
Fierce loyalty, takes sides, protects.
Guardian dominant. The friend who protects fiercely. The fix is rarely less loyalty; it’s loyalty that includes telling friends hard truths privately while defending them publicly — the rarest and deepest version.
The Versatile Friend
All six modes available.
Rare result. No friendship mode dominates. You match mode to friend deliberately — anchor, spark, mirror, mentor, drift, guard, deployed where each fits. The work is making sure ‘versatile’ isn’t ‘shallow’ — that the matching is conscious depth, not chameleon mimicry.
The Many-Friended
All modes running at once across a wide network.
Five or more modes running at once. Either a wide, deep network where you play different roles across different people (real richness), or trying to be all things to all friends (exhausting, produces loneliness despite social abundance). The fixes are very different; honest accounting matters.
Why a Friendship Test Matters
Friendship is the most under-conceptualized adult relationship. We have whole shelves on romantic relationships and parenting — frameworks, archetypes, attachment styles, conflict scripts, repair toolkits. Friendship gets advice columns and the occasional book. Most adults have never been given language for the relationship type that actually accounts for the largest share of their non-family wellbeing across decades.
The cost of that gap is specific. Friendships drift not because they’re shallow, but because nobody named what was happening. The mentor friend pushes a friend who needed mirroring; the friendship cools. The spark gets exhausted lighting up a friend who’s an anchor and stays steady but never reciprocates the energy. The drifter never reaches out and the anchored friend slowly stops reaching back. None of these are character flaws. They are mode mismatches that go unnamed, and named, they’re often easy to repair.
This test gives you language for how you show up. Knowing your mode — and being able to recognize the modes around you — is most of the difference between friendships that deepen across decades and friendships that quietly drift, despite everyone meaning well. Which is, as it turns out, how almost all of them end.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this a clinical or scientific assessment?
No. It’s an educational tool grounded in friendship research from social psychology and sociology, plus the practical literature on adult friendship maintenance. It’s not a diagnostic instrument and is not intended to replace one — but the modes it measures map to documented patterns researchers have observed across cultures.
How long does the test take?
About five minutes. There are 24 short statements scored on a five-point Disagree-to-Agree scale. You can go back and change any answer until you reach the result.
Can I be more than one mode?
Yes — almost everyone is. The test identifies your loudest mode (the one running across most of your friendships), but most people have a primary and a secondary. The ‘Two Loudest Modes’ section names both.
What if I'm a different kind of friend with different friends?
That’s healthy and normal. The test asks about how you show up across most friendships. If you genuinely shift modes deliberately by friend, you’ll likely score ‘The Versatile Friend’ — and the work for you is making sure the matching is conscious, not chameleon mimicry.
Are there 'good' and 'bad' modes?
No. Every mode produces something for friends and costs something to the person running it. The Drifter sounds the most worrying but is a real mode researchers find consistently — and many drifters maintain decades-long friendships their non-drifter friends accept as the natural rhythm. The work is matching mode to friend, not finding the ‘best’ mode.
What if my top score is tied?
The profile defaults to the mode listed first. The ‘Two Loudest Modes’ section will show both regardless of any tie.
Are my answers stored anywhere?
No. The entire test runs in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server, no account is needed, and reloading the page wipes your answers.
Where can I learn more?
Robin Dunbar’s Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships covers the research on friendship structure. William Rawlins’s The Compass of Friendship is the classic on the dialectics of adult friendship. Lydia Denworth’s Friendship covers the contemporary scientific picture. For the practical, Marisa Franco’s Platonic is excellent.