I also desperately need dihydrogenmonoxide because it makes up 60% of my body.

@gsiamne Yes, and there is that too.

@desertastronomer Really?!? I WIN????

Trust me, that's how it often feels, no matter how hard I try to find new things to do or fill my life up to replace her part in my life. And the worst part is being treated as defective or suddenly no longer competent for a relationship or desirable to date for being honest about feeling empty or depressed about being alone thru death and wanting to be in a relationship again. People can be very judgmental and cruel about experiences they have not lived themselves. I am just as competent and capable of loving someone and being a good partner as I was years ago. The difference is that after two years of rejection with online dating, I no longer have the confidence about myself and hope about finding someone again that I had two years ago.

@TomMcGiverin that sucks. Chin up all that shit.

I'd given up on it myself. Went through a very abusive relationship where my ex slowly lost her mental faculties over the course of just under a decade, and took it out on everyone and everything around her. Shattered my confidence. Took years to recover, wasn't interested in dating and wasn't really looking - my hopes for online dating were just to find someone to have lunch or dinner with once or twice a month.

Then I hit the relationship lottery. I wish everyone could, seriously.

@1of5 Glad it worked out for you. It truly is a lottery. My late wife and I had a long, good and happy relationship and marriage. She was not mentally ill, she just developed dementia in 2011 and the rest was mostly suffering for both of us followed by her death. So I share some of your experience, but not all of it.

@TomMcGiverin so sorry for your loss.

Dementia is tough to deal with. My stepdad has Alzheimer's and I can't get my mother to accept any help with him - she thinks that no one will take care of him like she can, so he's not getting the care he actually needs and she's basically killing herself with the stress of caring for an 85 year old body with a 3 year olds brain in it. Love, sometimes, makes us make devastatingly bad decisions.

I hope you find someone in this round of playing the lottery.

@linxminx Tried Meetup groups. It really doesn't improve one's odds of meeting someone to date because in my experience, it's the same women there that are on the dating sites. So you are meeting the same people. That's why I am just sticking with the Meetup groups that interest me for themselves, not joining ones that don't interest me because I might or might not meet any women there.

Also, Meetup groups by their nature are very fleeting. I have joined three of them that dissolved after meeting for less than two years. One of them never even met once, another met only once. I joined a fourth one about three years ago and quit going after about a year because it was always the same few people, who were all way younger than me and all the group ever met for was to play trivia once a month, even tho it was supposed to be more varied than that.I am currently attending one that is for single and divorced people, altho they allow widowers like me too, but it is pretty much divorced people, mostly women who are way younger than me and all of them Christians who are also in Meetup Christian singles groups as well. So, no hipsters there for me to relate to and connect with. Also, that group pretty much doesn't offer much opportunity now for connecting and socializing at their monthly events, which are just classes about dating led by the group's organizer, a dating and relationship coach who is using the classes to promote her coaching business. I have no illusions about this situation with that group.

Bourbon for me,,, but scotch will do!

This is my thought exactly. But try this sometime, sit in silence and read some lyrics to songs you know very well and have been listening to forever. You will (assuming you are as music oriented as I) hear the music that goes with words. It’s a neat brain trick for us music lovers. Ah Via Musicom!

@JacobMeyers That is true for me as well. I would still be able to "hear" the music in my head. Just like the character of Andy in The Shawshank Redemption could hear Mozart's music in his head while he spent his time in solitary confinement for playing the music over the prison loudspeaker.

Thank you for being a lot more brutally honest than most people here. It takes guts for a someone to say that knowing how common it is here for someone to get attacked or labeled as needy or defective for wanting to be in a relationship again. Here comes the chorus of how you need to love yourself first and all that bullshit.......

@TomMcGiverin Oh, you needy one.

Of course you can. Do you have one now? If not yes you can live without one.

@Jolanta And here she is, right on cue. Time to block.....