To jump through hoops is part of long-term dating. You have to celebrate your anniversaries well — flowers, cards, personal gifts — even before the one-year mark. Valentine’s Day has to be suitably impressive. Birthdays are huge.

But no dating test is more intimidating than judgment by parents.

Sorry, no excuses — everybody has to survive it. It might require you to be polite at a formal dinner. You might even have to figure out what a salad fork is. My test came this Christmas in the form of a crossword puzzle.

There we sat, deep in cogitation like sculptures: Emily, my girlfriend of more than a year; Gary, her father, a lanky giant and veteran of scores of Cryptic Crosswords like the one in front of us; her brother Jeff, strolling in and out of the kitchen, always with another answer.

And me, the visiting boyfriend.

As I pondered “Gopher or woodchuck in lair surrounded by garbage,” six letters, I began to wonder if this was my moment. It felt like my brains were being measured on a scale.

“Rodent?” I tried. Yes!

If this was The Test, I had to help solve this puzzle to earn Gary’s blessing. A minute earlier I had been having fun. Now I was obsessing about how much I could lose.

Sitting and scratching my head like a dope might get me dumped and kicked out of the house. It was trial by fire on the last page of The New York Times Magazine.

Panic is your biggest enemy during The Test. Overanalyzing makes perfectly normal parents look like enemies. Gary is a mild-mannered, nice guy — but when he read me one clue, I could swear the look in his eyes said, “I will have no idiot grandchildren, boy!”

“Dribbled?” I guessed.

“Yup.”

I tried to relax. You know these people, I told myself. They invited you to their house — they must like you. But reason was no help.

And so it went for the next two hours. The guessing and muttering grew more frantic. Fingers drummed and possibilities narrowed. The words that remained were the best hidden of all. Silences dragged on, interrupted only by periodic hmms and the uncomfortable shifting of chairs.

We had backed the beast into a corner, where it was most dangerous. The Test was at its most intense. I’d solved a few clues, but had I done enough?

For half an hour, we struggled with a clue regarding Shakespeare dancing with a woodland animal. We fought on, because you can’t turn your back on a Cryptic Crossword. Anyone who has quit knows the pain of seeing the answers and that unanswerable question: “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Perhaps this was fun for the others, but I knew the stakes as we pressed the combined force of our intellects against the foe. In the end the puzzle had no chance.

I might have made something out of nothing, or maybe I had proven myself a worthy suitor. There is no way to know with these mental trials.

More tests, big and small, are probably ahead, because it never ends. There’s always something to prove. But one day, you begin to understand you’ve already passed.

Good luck.

Marley Seaman is a Medill senior. He can be reached at [email protected].