Tired of modern dating rules? Ghosting, situationships, “what are we?”—it all starts to feel new until you realize history tends to repeat itself. So why not look back to a time when chivalry was very much not dead (despite what your last Hinge date might suggest)? You, the reader will be going back in time thanks to our our researchers over at MEDVLSTD 111 who have compiled a robust, curated selection of medieval texts—Ganymede and Helen, a selection of troubadour poems, Marie de France’s lais, Yvain, and The Knight in the Panther Skin—to help today’s forlorn lovers finally understand what kind of romantic disaster they are. Expect knights galore, dramatic declarations of love, and stories that would likely be categorized today as somewhere between catering to the female gaze and Wattpad enthusiast. Because knowing your love language isn’t enough anymore, and just because you’ve taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator doesn’t mean you actually know how you love.
This quiz is built on a simple question: what kind of medieval lover are you? The medieval texts mentioned above all construct romantic ideals, but they do not agree on what love should look like. Some value beauty and pleasure, others longing and distance, others social legitimacy, and others loyalty proven through suffering and separation. By translating these competing models into four modern romantic archetypes, this quiz sorts you into the kinds of lovers medieval literature rewards, punishes, or renders impossible. But as you’ll quickly find, the rules don’t quite line up: the love that is praised in one text is condemned, mocked, or made unattainable in another. Rather than clarifying who is allowed to love and how, medieval literature reveals that acceptable love is an unstable category—one shaped by conflicting fantasies of what love should be.
Before you begin: keep track of how many times you choose each letter, because you’ll need it to find out what kind of medieval lover you are.
Quiz:
1. You meet someone you’re really into. What happens next?
You start hanging out regularly (late-night texts, spontaneous plans) but every time the conversation gets close to “what are we,” you somehow pivot.
You stalk their Spotify, imagine your wedding playlist, and convince yourself this is either fate or a devastating lesson. No in-between.
You ask them within the first few dates what they’re looking for and feel mildly stressed until you’re both on the same page.
You have amazing chemistry, but something about the timing feels off, so you pull back, telling yourself it’ll mean more if it works out later.
2. Your ideal relationship dynamic looks like…
You see each other all the time, but no one’s asking questions or defining anything.
There’s longing. There’s tension. Maybe you don’t even end up together, but it changes your life.
You meet each other’s friends, make plans in advance, and have a shared understanding of where things are going.
You go through something difficult, long-distance during your summer internships, bad timing because THEY JUST got back together with their ex, emotional turmoil because they’re a philosophy major, and come out the other side stronger.
3. They tell you, “I’m not ready for a relationship right now.” You…
Say “that’s totally fine,” and continue seeing them exactly the same way as before.
Interpret it as part of a larger emotional arc and convince yourself they’ll realize your connection is different.
Take a step back because “exclusive but not dating” doesn’t make any sense.
Accept it, but respond to their late-night texts, quietly waiting for the moment when they are ready.
4. Pick the scenario that feels the most like you:
You’ve been seeing someone for three months, but introducing them as anything other than “a friend” still feels… premature.
You once liked someone more after they became unavailable.
You’ve had at least one moment where you thought, “I just want to put a label on it.”
You’ve convinced yourself that loving someone from afar counts just as much—if not more—than being with them. It’s more romantic obviously.
5. Your biggest relationship downfall is:
You keep things going without ever really progressing them. Why fix something that isn’t broken?
You fall in love with potential more than reality.
You ask about baby names on the third date. You obviously don’t want to progress if they name our kid something like “X Æ A-12”
You stay loyal to your crush even when they don’t know you exist.
6. Which of these feels the most romantic to you?
Meeting someone on vacation and then never seeing them again, because it’s never that serious. Think Before Sunrise but without the sequels.
A love that feels almost unreal—like the romance section of Barnes and Nobel #booktok
He brought a housewarming gift to my parents’ anniversary. That was our third date btw. I knew I was marrying when I met him.
A love that survives distance, absence, or time apart. Long-distance gives you character.
7. You’re in a relationship, but there’s one catch: they ask you to keep it completely secret. You…
Agree—it’s kind of ideal. No pressure, no expectations, no public complications.
Agree at first, but start to romanticize it as this intense, hidden love that makes everything feel more meaningful. Hook up in the stacks?
Feel uneasy—if it can’t be acknowledged publicly, what’s the point?
Agree, but eventually tell someone anyway… and the entire situation spirals because of it.
8. Things are going really well, but you’re given a clear boundary: don’t disappear or mess this up. You…
Don’t overthink it, you assume things will work themselves out regardless.
Take it seriously, but also kind of believe that if it’s meant to be, it’ll survive anything.
Stick to the plan, you value consistency and don’t want to risk losing something stable.
Fully intend to respect it… but get caught up in your own life, lose track of time, and realize too late that you’ve ruined everything.
How to Score Your Results
Keep track of how many times you chose each letter:
Mostly A’s → The Situationship Final Boss
Mostly B’s → The Wattpad Romantic
Mostly C’s → The Serial Monogamist
Mostly D’s → The Professional Yearner
If you have:
4–6 of one letter → strong match
2–3 of two letters → hybrid lover
Hybrid Results: You may find yourself split between two types—for example, a Serial Monogamist with Wattpad Romantic tendencies. Medieval texts often demand contradictory things from love, so trying to fully belong to one category is nearly impossible.
Four or More A’s? You are … The Situationship Final Boss
(Ganymede, from Ganymede and Helen)
You don’t date…you circulate. You run into them in Lamont at 1am, share a playlist, maybe split a late-night Felipe’s run, and then somehow three weeks pass without either of you ever defining anything. Like Ganymede, you operate on attraction, timing, and presence—whatever feels good in the moment, without the burden of what it means. There’s always just enough connection to keep things going, and just enough distance to keep it from becoming real.
In medieval terms, this is where things get complicated. What reads here as chemistry and spontaneity would, for many theologians and proponents of courtly love, not register as love at all, but as something closer to lust. In Ganymede and Helen, this tension is staged explicitly: Ganymede defends a model of desire grounded in beauty, pleasure, and immediate attraction, while Helen argues for a form of love that is ordered, directed, and legible within a broader social and reproductive framework.
Even the poem itself refuses to resolve this. The debate draws in larger authorities—divine, aesthetic, moral—and yet no single model definitively wins out. If you follow Ganymede, you align yourself with a tradition that privileges beauty and pleasure—but also, notably, with Zeus, which is not exactly the safest moral ground. If you follow Helen, you gain legitimacy but lose the freedom that made the attraction compelling in the first place. See the problem? Even here, at the level of two idealized figures, love is already split into competing systems that cannot be reconciled.
Four or more B’s? You are … The Wattpad Romantic
(Lanval + Troubadour poetry + Marie de France)
Your love life has a plot. Not a timeline—a plot. You meet someone at a Currier ten-man, lock eyes for two seconds, and suddenly it’s your senior year and you’re still orienting your emotional life around that moment. Like Lanval, your ideal partner exists somewhere between real and imagined: elevated, exceptional, and governed by a set of conditions that make the relationship feel less like something you build and more like something you aspire to.
For a troubadour, love is not simply about mutual attraction or even fulfillment, but about refinement—of desire, of character, and of devotion. The ideal lover must be beautiful, noble, emotionally disciplined yet capable of intense feeling, modest yet worthy of admiration; love itself becomes a kind of performance of excellence. Even distance and longing are not flaws but mechanisms that heighten value: to love well is to endure, to wait, to feel deeply and continuously. This ideal, however, comes with limits. Courtly love is not for everyone; it presumes a very specific kind of lover, one who can meet these aesthetic, moral, and social expectations. Read alongside other medieval models, this creates a contradiction: what counts here as the highest form of love depends on qualities such as wealth, beauty, refinement, even the ability to suffer “correctly” that make it inaccessible to most. In this system, love is perfected not because it is universal, but because it is exclusive.
Four or more C’s? You are … The Serial Monogamist
(Helen, from Ganymede and Helen)
You don’t “see where things go.” Things go somewhere or you leave. You meet someone, you define it, you integrate them into your life: HUDS meals, problem sets, maybe even blocking off weekends in your GCal three weeks in advance. You are not interested in ambiguity; you are interested in clarity.
Helen would recognize this immediately. In Ganymede and Helen, she does not simply experience desire, she attempts to discipline it. Her model of love presents itself as “natural”: structured and oriented toward fulfillment. Love, in this sense, is something that should move forward, resolve itself, and take a recognizable form. This claim to naturalness, however, is more restrictive than it appears. It depends on a very specific alignment of gender, desire, and outcome: one that quietly excludes anything that does not fit within it. At the same time, Helen’s own position reveals a tension she cannot fully resolve: she is drawn to Ganymede’s beauty and immediacy even as she argues against the kind of desire he represents. Love, for her, must be directed and justified—but it does not begin that way. This is the contradiction at the center of your love: it feels like the most stable and universal model, but only because it has been carefully narrowed into a particular form. What presents itself as the most “natural” kind of love turns out to rely on limits that are anything but natural. You’re not wrong—you’re just following a system that defines love so precisely that it excludes more than it includes.
Four or more D’s? You are … The Professional Yearner
(Yvain + The Knight in the Panther Skin)
Your crush moved to the Quad, and now you talk about the relationship like you’re in a medium-distance marriage. You know exactly when your dhall crush gets lunch every Tuesday, you’ve memorized the walk from the Yard to Cabot, and somehow a twelve-minute shuttle ride has only made your feelings more serious. In other words, you turn logistical inconvenience into emotional destiny.
Medieval romance would understand this instinct immediately. In Yvain, love is not simply something one possesses; it must be proven, lost, and won back through delay and suffering. Yvain’s problem is not that he does not love, but that he cannot sustain love and chivalric ambition at the same time—the very acts meant to prove his worth are what separate him from it. The Knight in the Panther Skin, though set in medieval Georgia, reinforces this model: love is measured through endurance across distance, where constancy depends on surviving separation rather than avoiding it. This produces a central contradiction. Love is supposed to be unwavering, yet it becomes legible only through absence. The more devotion is proven through waiting and suffering, the harder it becomes to sustain love as a lived, mutual relationship. In these texts, yearning is not a failure of love but its highest form—and that is precisely the problem. The more perfect love becomes, the less possible it is to actually live.
Cited Sources
Rustaveli, Shota. The Knight in the Panther’s Skin. Translated by Venera Urushadze, Sabchota Sakartvelo, 1968.
Marie de France. The Lais of Marie de France. Translated by Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby, Penguin Classics, 1999.
Chrétien de Troyes. Yvain, or The Knight with the Lion. Translated by David Staines, Hackett Publishing Company, 1990.
Boswell, John, translator. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Kline, R. L., translator. From Dawn to Dawn: Troubadour Poetry. Garland Publishing, 1981.
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