Tonight, Wal-Mart was kind enough to remind me that I am alone in the world, at the end of an online survey from one of my recent in-store visits:

But I’m not one of those people who will go stir-crazy alone in their house; I have plenty of hobbies, plenty to do, 1,576 Facebook Friends, and I’m not going to (two months later anyway) sit and stare at the walls and be depressed at home.

Sure, I have to keep the TV news on most of the time to keep my mind off of things, and in the car I’m either listening to the news or the stand-up comedy stations for the same reason.

But I have attempted to get some (offline) human interaction since the divorce, which everyone has insisted is necessary. For me this has meant being more sociable than I was while married (we rarely got together with friends).

My new-found attempts at offline human interaction started out with me having about one lunch per week with close friends, including some who had recently been through divorce. That is continuing, plus next week I’m going to see “The Facebook Movie” with some people from work, and I went to the department cookout this week.

The cookout was nice, though everyone seemed to be talking about kids, or being married. I hadn’t realized how much I would miss talking about those things and how much of an outsider I would feel amongst happy couples with children, remembering that I once had all that, but had lost it.

As a result of all of this, I’ve been considering that eventually I will have to integrate myself back into the “dating” society, and it’s not something I look forward to. Right now I have no interest in a relationship, because I can’t really get over my ex yet, though people tell me those feelings won’t be forever.

If there was one thing that my ex-wife and I agreed on, it was that we were “too old” to try to date again. Even saying that, I had no idea the security that being married gave me – my wife loved me for who I was and I didn’t have to worry about being “on” for potential mates, didn’t have to worry that every woman I met could be “the one.” Now I do again.

It’s funny because you think “Oh, 60% of marriages end in divorce” so you figure if you get divorced, they’ll be plenty of single people out there. But what they don’t tell you is that 95% of those people have since gotten involved in another relationship, got engaged, or re-married. There just aren’t a lot of single people out there.

I’ve never been much to go out to bars to meet people; thank goodness there is online dating now, which didn’t exist the last time I was looking for a significant other, and I know some friends who have met with some success using that method. At least those people are clearly labeled “single,” while here in the real world you have to hunt high and low for people you think might be single, and most of the time be disappointed in the reality.

If I do decide to enter into another relationship with a woman, I won’t do it lightly. I want a woman that was as beautiful, intelligent, and caring as my ex – or more so. That was the one thing I always told her – I didn’t have to “settle” when I found her, and I won’t settle in the future either. I may be alone, but I’m not lonely.