Quiz: Is Your Roommate a Cult Leader or Are You the Parent of a Toddler?

Either way, we're concerned for your safety and wellbeing.

1. They repeatedly interrupt your sleep, keeping you in a state of fatigue and bleary-eyed confusion, seeking only to fulfill their every need and desire.

2. If you attempt to talk to or connect with a loved one (or just another adult), they cut you off or interrupt you, creating a sense of distance and isolation.

3. They dress, shall we say, eccentrically?

4. They wear the same outfit. Every. Single. Day.

5. They constantly pull the rug out from under you with unpredictable, unattainable demands like, “I want a playground” at 2 a.m. and “I want to go to the moon.”

6. They eliminate any household concept of individual ownership. Your underwear drawer is no longer private. No food you may attempt to eat is off limits from being conscripted.

7. They dictate the timing of meals. And control how much you can eat at each meal and whether it’s hot or cold.

8. You are penalized or punished for leaving. Even if it’s just to the next room to grab a tissue for their snotty nose.

9. At the end of each day you’re left with a hollow sensation that no matter how hard you try you will never measure up.

10. They lack any sense of empathy for others, stopping at nothing to get the attention or screen time or cracker or block or firetruck T-shirt they want.

11. You must learn their system of irrational or inexplicable fears and go to great lengths to create a world where the things they fear are hidden from them.

12. Your time for hobbies or interests you used to have has shrunk or disappeared altogether due to your myopic focus on this person and their needs.

13. You are expected to buy into bizarre beliefs about the world that no one else can see or understand, like they are actually a tiger. Or the floor is lava.

14. They constantly gaslight you. That toast cut into triangles they requested? You must have imagined that. Certainly they said squares. Why would one ever ask for triangles? You must have lost your mind.

15. Just when you’re at the end of your rope, feeling like the whole relationship is bananas and that something terrible might happen if you don’t get away, they say the most charming thing that makes you feel like the center of the universe—and you’re sucked right back into the vortex.
    
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If you answered yes to one or more between 1-15: toddler.

If you answered yes to one or more between 1-15: cult leader.