Now here comes the hard part. To find answers, you have to truly embrace this stage you're in now. Do that and, paradoxically, you're more likely to end up with a boyfriend—for reasons I'll explain—but you can't be doing it to get a boyfriend. You have to relish where you are right now, without a view to side returns—something of a Zen conundrum. How are you going to "be here now" when you're bombarded with all the single-woman messages? "You'd better hurry up and find someone." "Time's running out." "There are no men out there." "Watch out, he's about to cheat on you." (Oh, wait, that's the one the married women get.)

To begin with, you're going to banish the words "out there" from your vocabulary and mind. For all the discussion we give to it, it's easy to forget that it's not a real place. Out there has a lot in common with Narnia, in fact: It's fraught with peril, and it's invisible. I've been at tables of women where we've spooked ourselves all night with discussions of out there ("Once you reach a certain age, you begin to try to make it work with anyone, because you realize there are no men out there"), then we've turned to the single among us and advised, "You know, you just have to get yourself out there." (All conversation guaranteed verbatim.)

Start to pay attention to your thoughts when you're freaking, and you'll begin to see how often you're getting flummoxed by unnecessary fear. The question, Why am I single? sends you in one direction and one direction alone: toward a zone of fear. The implication is, you're failing. You're in the void. That kind of thought is a trap. "Has anything good and strong ever come out of fear?" my friend Sarah asks. "It's a bad motivator. It always drives you into things that are wrong." For instance, and above all, the next bad relationship. Leap into another just to shore yourself up from the last, and a nasty cycle sets up. Because you're in the new relationship for shaky reasons—to salve the pain from the first—the second's pretty much guaranteed to fall apart. At which point, if you don't step back, you'll end up scrambling for a third that's destined to self-destruct.