My mood follows my predicted dating prospects in a sine wave of doom

I want to find love. I want to go on dates and find out what that's like. And I notice my mood on any given day depends heavily on how I feel about my prospects — which feeling rises and dips over time, leading to a "sinusoidal" mood.

When I feel optimistic about my prospects, I'm in the positive region of the sine wave. There seem to be lovely girls all around me who I still have a shot with. All's well. I'm cheerful and smooth and I enjoy myself. I feel clear, confident, capable, joyful. I enjoy others' company and they enjoy mine.

When I feel pessimistic about my prospects, I'm in the negative region of the sine wave. The girls are all gone. Nothing's going right. I'm in hell. I'm never going to get what I want. It's impossible and foolish to hope for love. It's foolish to even continue to want. I feel by turns anxious and sad and angry. I am so in my head I can be no company to anyone, let alone enjoy their company.

In between the peaks and troughs, there's a wide band corresponding to, "Things are basically okay, and looking up (or down)." I'm chugging along. Business as usual. "I'll manage."

I haven't tracked my mood to see if it strictly follows a sine wave. I suspect it wouldn't follow a neat formula — I don't think anyone's would. But it definitely has this up and down quality to it.

I think I've had this experience before. I remember reading an exchange about something like this and relating to it in other situations. It's not a perfect match for this one, though — those other experiences matched closer because they're higher frequency. The mood would shift over minutes and the focus is relatively narrow in scope: "This email," or "this telephone call," or "this text," I hope it's received well and fear it won't be. The kind of shift I'm writing about today feels more languorous. It happens over hours or days or weeks. When I'm inching along the curve it feels subtle, hardly noticeable, but the gap between peak and trough is undeniable.

Something that's especially frustrating about the tie between my prediction of romantic prospects and my mood is that my mood and prospects are strongly correlated. If I'm in a good mood, my prospects are better. If I'm in a sour mood, my prospects are poor. And I'm aware of this. So my mood tends to reinforce itself, and in turn hyperstitions the good or ill prospects it's anticipating into reality.

This is stupid — so, so stupid. It pisses me off. Why should I be in a bad mood when it hinders me so directly? Worse, why when I notice my bad mood should it darken my mood further, why should I make things worse on myself? It's like I notice a nail stuck in my forehead and as soon as I notice it I take a knife to my head because the nail means I'm in pain and that must be keeping me from getting what I want and I have to feel the appropriate amount of pain about that... and so on, and so on, so I kept slashing. It's the dumbest shit.

Is this just human nature? Sometimes we're happy and sometimes we're unhappy. I don't think this is a necessary fact of existence. I find myself convinced unhappiness is a choice — not a choice one makes in clarity to drive a nail through one's forehead but a choice nevertheless. So I think — no, this isn't damn well necessarily, it is a choice. It is a really stupid choice.

So why do I keep making it? Can I stop making it? Can anyone? Is there any person who has stopped making this choice? How many of us could stop making this choice?

I wonder.