My new article, “Don’t Worry, Be Single Happy,” is now available online (hopefully) for your reading pleasure. An excerpt:

As the learned sage Rav McFerrin once intoned, “In every life we have some trouble. … When you worry you make it double. Don’t worry, be happy.” This has also been the prevailing wisdom within the single-and-dating population. You project what you feel inside: if you act happy and confident then you will be happy and confident. Your inner middot (values) and good personality will seize the day and people will naturally gravitate to you. Essentially, if you feel attractive on the inside, you’ll be attractive on the outside. You will be what you projected you’d be.

Just one problem: for the men and women who are single and want to be otherwise, the years of solitude — or singularity, if you prefer — can make even the most optimistic person feel less attractive. An evening that starts in optimism can turn on a dime into disappointment; peaks exist because valleys also do. And after years of mixed messages from parents, media and well-meaning friends, the self takes a hit.

“Create your own happiness, because great expectations lead to great achievements,” we’re told one minute; the next, we’re offered the comfort that “something will happen when you least expect it.” So are we supposed to expect good things so that good things happen? Or to expect nothing, so that the elusive goal “something” will find us when we’re sufficiently unprepared? How many years should you not expect happiness before it becomes apparent that the “great expectations” people were right after all? Or is it vice versa?

If only there were a book guaranteed to tell us how to behave in dating, a Rosetta Stone to decode the emotional hieroglyphs we encounter. But instead of a book, we get books—dozens, possibly hundreds–published each year that remind us to wait for the right mensch to marry, urge us to get over the guys or girls who aren’t that into us, or lay down the rules for us to follow. But just like what happened with the first Good Book, interpretation is subjective. If three days is the standard between the date and the callback, what’s the etiquette when the date was a webcam chat and the callback was being “poked” on Facebook? Our denominations speak different dialects and seem to recreate the Tower of Babel with each textual encounter. And so cuneiform remains, maddeningly, all-but-undecipherable.

Could happy=happy really be that simple? To some people it is. At Harvard, the positivity principle is climbing high like the university’s storied ivy; it’s estimated that one out of five students has taken a class by Professor Tal Ben-Shahar, an Israeli-born lecturer who teaches the secrets to unlocking happiness. While I’m not applying to Harvard just to take his course, I could get to Barnes & Noble and find his book with its sunny yellow cover that practically exhorts you to personify its title, Happier.

If I sought a left coast perspective, on the theory that those more familiar with sunshine might have a better grasp on the condition of the sunny disposition, I could grab UC-Riverside professor Sonja Lyubomirsky’s The How of Happiness. Then I’d learn that 40 percent of our happiness is within our own control. So, who’s holding the strings to the other 60 components of my happiness? Well, according to Lyubomirsky, it’s 50 percent “genetics” and 10 percent “circumstance.” It’s easy to start wondering how much of “circumstance” is a result of choices we have made, and therefore honestly belongs in “our” 40 percent.

There are lots of these books, sitting on shelves in bookstores and piling up in my apartment on windowsills. But I don’t feel in my heart that any book has the answers. This is very unnerving for someone brought up to believe that there is a central text that provides a structure for living, human behavior and spiritual action.

Identifying the components of happiness, seems a Sisyphean task—as fruitless as it is frustrating. Maybe it’s more useful to look to the Magic 8-Ball sitting on my computer desktop for answers. Will things happen when I least expect them? “My reply is negative,” M8B says. Does happiness reside within my own control? “Cannot predict now,” it demurs. Should singles pretend to be happy, in the hope that one day they will be? “Don’t bet on it,” the orb counsels. But with so many variables in determining dating happiness, is happiness even possible? I click the Magic 8-Ball one last time, expecting nothing and everything. “Outlook quite good,” it comforts.

Esther D. Kustanowitz cautions you not to use Magic 8-Ball to make important life decisions—it is for entertainment uses only. You can email Esther at jdatersanonymous@gmail.com.