Hello people. I am an outlier to society, and I need some advice on how to not be an outlier.

I am a 31 year old male, I am straight, and I have just finished recovering from a very rare form of stomach cancer. I also have a college degree, and I make decent money (59,750 before taxes), I am debt free, I own my own car outright, and I have a comfortable nest egg in investments. I am just over 6'2", I weigh 254 lbs (as of last night), I have a job that has good job security and top of the line medical benefits (those benefits literally saved my life).

I am also single. Painfully single.

Growing up, I was not exposed to women at all really. I was raised in a fundamentalist christian family, we lived 30 minutes away from the closest town, and I hated going to church. I escaped into video games and comic books, and when I finally got to college, I was exceptionally shy. I was the guy you would see at 9pm on a saturday night writing code for a pet project to get extra points for my grades. I was that straight edge nerd with glasses who didn't touch alcohol because it was "sinful".

Thankfully, college sowed the seeds that blossomed into full blown atheism, but while I was in college I stayed single. I am not sure that any woman would have dated me then, I didn't try to reach out, mostly because I was obsessed with my own world of math, code, 3d printers, cryptocurrency and videogames. Then I graduated, and went to work in a relatively small town with a median age of 50, and almost no singles. Also, I was busy paying off my student loans at the time, and I was working overtime, so I had no time for a social life. And then, just as I had finished off the student loans, I got cancer and spent a year going through chemotherapy, radiation therapy and surgery. The doctors say that people who go through six rounds of the chemo I took have a 95% chance of being sterile. I went through 11 rounds. It was the worst experience of my life, and a hell I wouldn't wish on anyone. But that leaves me where I am today.

I really don't know how to date. I looked at a few dating subs, and it feels like I am emerging from a bunker into the middle of world war 3. I am a blank slate so to speak, all I know is that being alone has started to be physically painful. When I was in bed looking up at the ceiling wondering if I would die in the next few months, all I could think was that I would be dying alone, and its an awful feeling to have. Not having anyone to even hold your hand when you are are vomiting your guts out, nobody to talk to, nobody to hold or be held by.... the loneliness was the single most painful part of the cancer process, although the sum of the other parts of the pain outweighed the loneliness I would say loneliness was between 20-30% of the total pain, and 60%-70% of the emotional pain. You can see how much of a nerd I am there, I am literally quantifying my own pain and emotions into numbers like if I were a computer program! At least I am self aware of that... :/

So tell me, what expectations should I have, what should I be looking for, and what are women looking for? I don't even really know acceptable age ranges, I came across a rule of half your age plus 7, but that would make my lower bound 22, but I feel like my personal lower bound would probably be higher... 24 or 25? And I have never been on a date, so to quote han solo... I have a bad feeling about this. I think I would make a lot of mistakes. All I want is to find someone so I won't be alone.