It sounds to me like you suffer from chronic depression that would be afflicting you regardless of whether your ex-wife were a wonderful, loyal woman still married to you.

Notice how you said that you realize others have worse lives? The depth of a person's clinical depression tends to not correlate with the current hardships in their life. When you're depressed 5 years after your divorce, you're not depressed because you got divorced. You're just depressed.

The grief of losing something can be intense, but healthy humans recover from grief. You are chronically depressed. The reasons for that probably have roots in conditions of your life from before you even met your wife.

You are focused on the divorce as the cause of all your unhappiness. It's not. You are profoundly unhappy and you need to start examining why. Focusing on the loss of your marriage is keeping you from what you really need to think about.

You lost a wife who was no great catch. Something else is wrong. I don't know what that is, but deep down in your soul, you do have at least a clue. You meet and date women, but you don't find a meaningful connection with any of them. It's not because none of them are as wonderfully fascinating as your ex-wife. She wasn't all that!

You had a set idea as to how life was supposed to go. Then it went off the rails. You expected to wake up every day with your kids in the same house as you. Getting through law school isn't easy. You paid a lot of dues to earn a decent life. It was supposed to go a certain way, and it didn't. So now you feel so betrayed that life has cheated you. So you want to revolt against life by refusing to live. After all - why should you when life is so unfair.

It sounds like your marriage failed because you married a woman who, basically, was not wife material. You made a bad selection. You were young and dumb. So, now, you're older and wiser. It's too bad that some of life's most important lessons have to be learned so painfully. But that's how the cookie crumbles, sometimes. Things don't always go the way they were "supposed" to. The smart thing is to accept that reality. Say to yourself, "Okay, the way I had things figured out was wrong, so I'll reconfigure my thinking. I'll chose to adapt to reality."

Stop judging women you haven't even met. Bad people often do have a special kind of charisma that makes them seem like the most desirable. You fell for that, and you got burned. So open your heart to people who aren't so breathtakingly charismatic. These are the very people who often build very rich and satisfying lives.