I love Ask MetaFilter — probably my favorite website besides tumblr that the school hasn’t blocked.  I think a community of people that help people and offer good advice in their spare time has to be filled with kind, solid folks.  This is a particularly good chunk of advice.  Best parts for me?

“When my partner and I had only been dating a couple months in the summertime, he mentioned to me how much he was beginning to look forward to winter, as it was an excellent season to have someone to snuggle and keep warm with. From my unsteady emotional position, I reacted poorly. ‘Let’s just get through the summer,’ I joked, but he couldn’t help hearing the discouragement in my words, and to his credit, really made fun of me for it. It’s still one of our jokes, over 5 years later. Whenever one of us blithely comments on some future event we have to look forward to, the other is ever ready with a ‘Let’s just get through the ______(current season).’ But by and large, I think this is very healthy — approaching time in manageable portions is the only way to assess what you have and what you want by any comprehensible terms. Breaking up with someone because you don’t see yourself with them in 40 years doesn’t speak very well of your imagination. Anything can happen. Let’s just get through the summer.”

Another good bit?

“I think that for most people, most of the time, you never really know for sure. There are a few people who have that instant recognition of ‘this is my soulmate!’ but for most of us, it’s complicated, ambiguous, and always conditional. For most people, there simply isn’t just one perfect partner — there are a lot of possible partners, and it takes luck and compromise and a lot of hard work to make something work over the long term.

“I love my wife very, very much. But I don’t pretend that if we hadn’t met that I’d be doomed to a monastic life, or that she would still be sitting there, waiting for me. And neither of us knew instantly that this was the person we’d marry, or even fall in love with. I don’t think that usually it is helpful to try and look that far ahead, honestly. There are far more critical, and very pragmatic, day-to-day questions, like Does this person make me smile? Do I want to make the compromises that it would take to make her happy? Things like that, where if you consistently answer one way you have a happy situation, and consistently the other way things aren’t going to go happily.

“Accrue enough of those small decisions, and you have a relationship built on a really good foundation. But even if the other person is a great person, very compatible, and so on, if you aren’t ready for the relationship — if you aren’t ready to do the hard work and make the tough compromises — then it’s not going to work. You need that initial compatibility, or chemistry, call it what you will, but that’s just the entry point. Making it work each day after that is where the real work comes in.”

So comforting.