"As much as it's hard to cope with parents being imperfect, cheating, splitting," says therapist Tracey Cox, "it is sometimes harder to be presented with the ideal happy marriage".
Oyamel Cocina Mexicana, owned by we-wish-he-was-our-friend chef José Andrés may be the ideal happy hour venue for tourist and local alike.
He stuck to his ideals - happy to appear on, say, clip shows as a talking head or on Loose Ends, the Radio 4 magazine show, he would always end up being banned from them (I think he was banned from Loose Ends twice) because he was incapable of saying the right thing, or not saying the honest thing.
So-called pasture-raised hens fit many people's ideal of happy chickens on Old MacDonald's Farm.
Sayed's own work, which has been exhibited across Pakistan and India, questions the ideals of a "happy home" by recreating and transforming components of her childhood dollhouse.
Despite all my shiny happy ideals I'd started school with, I knew that as a lowly freshman, I could never tell this upperclassmen that she had just sat in a reserved spot.
None of them fancy the national ideal of a happy matriarch.
That includes the ideal of a happy, swirling melting pot of assimilated ethnic identities.
Wherever this boldness has come from, it isn't the Indian ideal of the happy and extended family.
But what unfolds onstage has a great deal in common with the slightly hesitant American ideal of the happy, enduring family of a sort wistfully immortalized in the art of Norman Rockwell.
Or perhaps they're just more bothered by the compromises that motherhood brings: As Slate's Meghan O'Rourke noted in a recent column, the study showed that American wives who subscribe to "feminist ideals" are the least happy of all.
