The Lego Ring Test

There are exactly two kinds of people in the world, and the Lego ring will tell you which you are. Picture the dinner—candles, some decent wine, someone looking at you like you’re worth the effort—and then the little box comes out. Inside is a ring made of interlocking plastic bricks. Stackable, primary-colored, exactly the kind of thing you built spaceships from at age eight.

One person sees a joke where a gesture should be and starts mentally drafting the breakup speech. The other nearly knocks over the wine—because what this person just said, in plastic bricks, is: I know what you thought was worth something when you were a kid, and I still think it’s worth honoring. The nerd loyalty of it. The retrograde sweetness. The implicit promise that life with this person will never entirely lose the plot.

I know which kind I am. The harder question is whether I’ll ever find another.