I don't want to sound overly negative, but why assume that an honest answer to those questions will make you feel better, rather than worse?
It's not an assumption; four weeks of bibliotherapy in the form of reading Feeling Good and doing the exercises has been shown in experiments to be superior to a placebo book for treating depression (75% of patients no longer qualified for DSM criteria of major depressive disorder afterwards), and the improvements were sustained at 3-month and 3-year followup.
Of course, you could then argue that the book doesn't actually make you evaluate your situation honestly and is just mindless positive thinking, but I don't think that'd be a fair assessment of the book.
The example you mention about romantic love is quite telling. Unattractive people have a much harder time finding romantic partners . And the partners they do find tend themselves to be unattractive. (The issue of physical attractiveness is of course just one example. There are many other cognitions underlying depression and anxiety which may also be rooted in solid evidence.)
Sure, but my example was "if I'm physically unattractive I'll never find romantic love" not " "if I'm physically unattractive I'll have a much harder time finding romantic love."
I started going out with a fantastic girl a couple of weeks ago. Everything is great, except that whenever I've sent her a text message or email requesting something and haven't received a response yet, I experience significant dysphoric anxiety, fearing that her response will be not just "no" but "no and I don't want to date you any more". This is due to brain chemistry or personal history, take your pick—either seems like a possible explanation to me. But there's certainly no evidence supporting the idea that this is likely to happen, nor is the anxiety helping me prevent it or helping me in any other way.
Does anyone have evidence-based advice, or pointers to same, on dealing with this kind of issue? It is the only splotch on what have otherwise been the best two weeks of my life.