Franz Davis could tell he had been out of the dating pool for years when he ventured back in after getting divorced.

“I honestly felt like I was on a different planet,” he said. “I hadn’t been on the dating scene since college.”

Davis, a divorce attorney in Minneapolis, had been married for eight years. He was a decade removed from the singles scene.

“People knew how to quickly meet then just hook up,” he said. Davis tried to work the bar and restaurant scene and found himself getting frustrated with the superficiality of it.

He ended up stepping away to work on himself. Instead of going out, he went to counseling and read books to figure out why his marriage had failed and how to avoid falling back into the same relationship patterns.

“Believe it or not, I really worked on it,” he said. He finally got to a point where he was happy being single, excited to go on solo bike rides and meet with friends at a restaurant. Of course, this was exactly when he met his future wife -- ironically enough, a matchmaker.

April Davis, president of LUMA Luxury Matchmaking, says the majority of her clients are divorced. They come to her with a mixed bag of experiences. Some refuse to try online dating, while others have been on a hundred app-instigated dates. Some have been hurt so badly that they cannot let a new person get too close emotionally. Others are so afraid of being alone, they are willing to settle for the next person who comes along.

Her advice starts from the same place: Figure out who you are as a single person. Find out which character traits and values are most important to you in a partner, and work on developing those same qualities in yourself.

“Like attracts like,” she said. Typically, a person’s confidence has taken a hit after a divorce, and he or she is unsure of how to navigate the modern dating scene, she said.

April says her general rule of thumb for the newly divorced is to take a month being single for every year of marriage before jumping into another relationship. Use that time as a chance to grow and learn, she said.

That’s the path Rachael Carter, 44, has embraced. Carter, an outgoing photographer in Lake St. Louis, also models and acts occasionally. What she doesn’t do much is date. She’s been divorced nearly two years after 12 years of marriage. She’s been on two dates.

“My focus is on making sure I’m raising a healthy, well-adjusted child,” she said. She doesn’t want the aftermath of the divorce to disrupt her teenage daughter’s life. Plus, she’s much more aware now of what she wants in a partner. She has no desire to use a dating app or site.

“After going through what I’ve been through, I think I’m looking for a deeper connection,” Carter said. Since her divorce, she also became very introspective. “I had to think about things I was passionate about that would bring joy back into my life.”

And now she’s OK being alone and focusing on building her career.

“I’m OK with me, and I’m OK being alone,” she said. “When you look for love, sometimes you look for the wrong things.”

Carly Spindel, who works as a matchmaker along with her mother at their company, Janis Spindel Serious Matchmaking in New York City, says custody situations can make dating even more difficult post-divorce.

“It gets more and more complicated,” she said, when each person has a strict custody schedule.

For Franz Davis, he was more cautious the second time around. But when he noticed his feelings progressing for April, he was direct.

“Are we developing something?” he asked her.

“No, I just want to be friends,” she said.

“I have enough friends,” he responded.

They ended up dating for four years and tied the knot in 2013.

“It’s your first day as an American, and you’ve already gone viral,” I told my husband.

My spouse, who has little use for social media and has never tweeted, looked at me like I was crazy. I had tweeted a photo of the welcome letter he’d received that morning at his naturalization ceremony in St. Louis. Labeled “a message from the President of the United States,” it was a beautifully written, undated form letter given to new American citizens.

It was signed by Barack Obama.

“My British-born husband takes his oath of citizenship today,” my tweet said. “In the packet for new Americans, the welcome letter from POTUS is from Obama.”

He’d done a double-take when he noticed the signature, wondering if he’d misread it. Then he Googled Obama’s signature to compare, and sure enough, it was from 44 -- not 45.

We laughed about it, and apparently the internet found it pretty funny, too.

By the end of the weekend, the tweet had been liked more than 175,000 times. Several sites posted “stories” about the snafu, simply reprinting my tweet and some of the rather hilarious reactions to it. The Hill asked the White House for comment, but had not received a response.

George Takei posted one such story on his Facebook page, noting that it was “probably better this way” -- as opposed to what such a letter from this new administration might say, I suppose.

I was contacted by Buzzfeed and Mashable, who wanted more details: Was it an oversight by the current administration? A petty retaliation by an office worker? A typical delay in turnover from one administration to the next?

The packet and letters are distributed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. In a statement sent to The Hill, USCIS Press Secretary Maria Elena Upson said that around 200 Obama-signed letters were sent out due to an administrative error.

The unforced error sparked lots of theories and wishful thinking by those who feel alienated by the current administration. Of course, it also prompted some ugly messages from trolls who said my husband should be “deported.”

For the past 17 years, I’ve asked my husband to give up his British citizenship and become an American.

After all, he’s lived here nearly his entire life, arriving when he was just 6 weeks old. Both his parents, now deceased, were Americans. He and two siblings were born in the U.K. while his father, a physician, completed medical training there.

His mother was an American by birth whose family roots in the Midwest went back many generations. His father was a naturalized citizen. All his siblings eventually filed the paperwork to become American citizens, but he was a holdout. Despite marrying a native-born American and having our children here, he held on to the notion that it might come in handy one day to have a U.K. passport.

He had been a permanent legal resident in America his entire life, and the only things he couldn’t do were vote and serve on a jury. For all intents and purposes, he felt like an American, and that was good enough for him.

It wasn’t enough for me.

In this political era, I wanted him to have all the rights and protections conferred upon citizens. So, after years of debate, he finally agreed.

It was a beautiful ceremony, complete with courthouse singers who sang one of the loveliest renditions of “America the Beautiful” we’ve ever heard. Then, like I always do, I teared up during the national anthem. It was more than just that swell of emotion that comes whenever I think about the ideals this country was founded on. It was witnessing this room full of hopeful new Americans, many of whom risked a great deal to come here and share in our vision of what we can be together.

I was so proud to see my husband, who has quietly given so much to this country, finally become a citizen.

His considerable professional contributions are outweighed by projects like the one he undertook a year and a half ago, when he spent his weekends rehabbing an old house his family owned. He fixed it up so that a newly arrived refugee family could have a place to make a fresh start. He’s always finding small, and large, ways to give back without ever seeking credit or anything in return.

He may have just recently made his citizenship official, but he’s long been an example to me of what makes America great.

The first thing he did as an American was register to vote.

I’m waging a lonely war against a rampant punctuation mark.

A year ago, The New York Times wrote forebodingly about the decline of the period, which now signifies a weighty intent if used while texting. But I am far more disturbed by the rise of the exclamation point. Everywhere I look, I’m bombarded by this tall, pointed signifier of overwhelming emotion.

Has this punctuation mark become ubiquitous because our discourse has risen to a fever pitch? Or because we’ve co-opted a mark of astonishment or severity to instead convey solidarity or friendliness?

I took my concerns to two language scholars, who both tried to convince me to give up the fight.

Exclamation mark avoidance is just as much a fetish as its abuse, said Geoff Nunberg, a linguist who teaches at the University of California-Berkeley. Overuse is particularly vexing to writers and journalists who have been trained to use the marks with restraint, he said.

I argued that those of us who use it sparingly are on the right side of language.

Relax, Nunberg practically exclaimed at me. It’s not that there’s a proliferation of exclamation points. It’s just that we see a lot more casual conversation, in the form of texts and tweets, that used to be spoken. And people attempt to reproduce the rhythms and contours of natural speech in their conversational writing, he said.

That’s true, I agreed. But I suspect there’s more to it than that.

The president himself is a lover of the exclamation point. Philip Cowell of the BBC writes that in 2016 alone, @realDonaldTrump posted 2,251 tweets using exclamation marks. He’s far more likely to end a tweet with a shriek than not.

“Overuse of any punctuation mark tells us something about ourselves, in the same way overuse of any object does. How you punctuate your sentences might have something to do with how you punctuate your life,” Cowell writes. Drawing attention to itself, the exclamation point is the selfie of grammar.

Preach, my comrade. In its excess, the exclamation point is garish and loses all potency.

Melanie Walsh, a doctorate student in American Literature at Washington University, is teaching a course in the fall about the pressures that social media puts on language.

“The way we use a period or other punctuation is evolving right before our very eyes,” she said. But she adds that this is not a bad thing: Language is always evolving. Maybe an individual exclamation mark doesn’t have the same meaning anymore -- maybe now five exclamation marks in a row have a new meaning.

But there’s no consensus in this new meaning, I said. It’s cloudy. Some people only use exclamations with close friends, to differentiate personal from business correspondence. Others use more exclamation marks with acquaintances to imply a familiarity that doesn’t really exist. Some use it to soften a message that may come across too strong, while others want to pump up their words with a bullhorn at the end.

Can we really trust people who end every text or tweet with an exclamation?

Walsh says she shies away from making value judgements about changes in language, adding that our ever-changing devices also influence our punctuation use.

“When I had a flip phone, I would be stingy with exclamation points,” she said. “When I got an iPhone, I could rattle off a million so easily.”

There’s a lot of historical baggage in how we use language, Walsh said. It shapes the way we think of ourselves and the way the world should be. We consider it an affront when people use language in a way that we don’t think is correct.

“I’m not saying you’re being nostalgic and curmudgeonly,” Walsh said, in an attempt to protect my feelings. In fact, I took that description as a compliment.

To further prove my point, I searched through recent tweets.

Dan (@sweetdeedly) wrote: “I forget that old people take the exclamation point at the end of a sentence in a text as yelling angrily and it ruins my life.”

(The olds are right, Dan.)

Kara Baskin (@kcbaskin) demonstrated how women use the mark to soften the way their message is perceived:

“-writes gentle, but firm, email

-immediately feels guilty

-adds an exclamation point

-feels better”

(Ladies, please stop feeling guilty for saying what you mean. It’s OK to use a period.)

Meanwhile, JustaGuy (@JMurray247) raised an existential issue: “Thx for the congratulatory text but you didn’t end it with an exclamation point so not sure if you’re happy for me or if you want to kill me”

(The omission could signify a difference in tone, a short attention span or just a lazy texter, JustaGuy.)

After arguing my case, I realized that my discomfort is likely an industry-specific form of snobbery, and puts me into a club of old grammar cranks.

Frankly, I’m fine with that.

(Note: This entire column was produced without deploying a single exclamatory missile, despite the writer’s very strong feelings on the subject.)