essay about regrets in love

• Human Relationships

Regret in a Relationship: Why Did I Fall in Love with You?

By Lisbeth Welsh

I’d never been hit before.  But then I’d never fallen in love with someone else’s husband before either.  I sat there and took it.  The screaming, the swearing, the cold hard sting as her hand connected with the left side of my face.   After all I deserved to have to sit and take it.  I had no leg to stand on.  I had done it.  Been in this affair.  I was the other woman that was blowing her life and marriage apart.  I deserved it.

Did I deserve for him to look the other way and allow her to hit me?  For him to not try to stop her?  For him to look away?  To stare down at his feet?

But what did I expect, he’d continually allowed her to hit him in arguments throughout their marriage.  Apparently.  He could ‘take a punch’.  Apparently.  If he had spent 33 years letting her hit him, why would he stop her hitting me?

Three years later I still feel that sting.  I still live on anti depressants and anti anxiety medications.  I still don’t sleep properly.  I still walk under the cloud.  I still haven’t forgiven myself.

He was my boss.  And so was she.  Her name was the one that sold the brand.  She was probably the one that had to sign my pay check every week.  And every week she signed that check for me to hang out with her husband and for us to fall deeper and deeper in love.

I suspect she knew long before she confronted it.  In fact no, I believe she willed us into being.  I walked into working with a couple who were falling apart.  Whose family was falling apart.  Whose grown children were a mess and plagued with self destructive diseases and addictions.

“I hate him.” She would throw those words around every day.  She would constantly stop, roll her eyes and mutter how hard it was to deal with him.  “I’ve told him, he either gets medication or divorce papers.”  The comments were endless.  He never said one bad thing about her to me.  He didn’t need to.  She would say it all to me for him. 

I could see how she treated him.  How she broke him.  People around were only too glad to share their observations with me. “Why does he stay?  She talks to him so badly. What does he get out of the relationship that keeps him there?”  Endless comments from others, unsolicited from me as I stood and watched the man I loved being broken by another woman

The man who I had become a friend and confidant to had fallen in love with me and I’d fallen straight in after him.  We didn’t even know until it was too late.  I had gone away for the holidays and that being apart was unbearable for us both.  But he was my boss.  I mistakenly believed we were protected by his marriage and our employer / employee relationship.  We had a boundary naturally imposed.  But we had woven a complicated emotional web as friends.  We had developed a deep bond.  Eventually he crossed the line.  I remember the feel of his arms around me.  His lips on my neck and I knew that there was no turning back.  I was scared for us both.  I was scared for my future.  I knew the day it started that it had to stop.  He was careless.  In public and in private.  We were like 14 year olds.  Excited to wake up in the morning.  Every day was full of life and laughter.  Every minute was an adventure.  The future was a wide, open, thrilling ride into the unknown.

I tried to make him be my best friend.  He couldn’t do it.  He wouldn’t do it.  He wouldn’t talk about it.  He KNEW that this was how everything would end for them.  He didn’t know how but he KNEW that I was gonna be his girl.  He knew everything.  And I believed him.  Because I wanted to?  Maybe.  Because I thought I knew it too? Maybe.

But three years later.  I knew nothing.  My biggest love is my biggest regret.  I cannot forgive myself.  Or him.  Or her.  The 3 of us are bound together by love, hatred & regret.  He would only leave if she allowed it.  Her threats of talking to newspapers and chat shows and taking all the money.  Threats of his children hating him and their sickness’ spiraling out of control.  The guilt that the unraveling of his children would all be his fault.  His ego that kept him there.  That kept the family together.  The ego that still calls and tells me how important it was to keep the family that way.  How hard it still is for him.  But she’s trying.  She’s working on her anger issues.  But that ego that still tries to keep me hanging on and tells me ‘that it could all change tomorrow’.

Three long years later.  I nearly destroyed myself.  I nearly destroyed my career.  I still live under a shadow of darkness.  Of regret.  Of lost love.  The black dog of depression and anxiety my closest friend.

Three years later, the sting still as cold on the skin of my left cheek as it was that day.  The day he called me and warned me she knew.  That he had told her.  At least, had told her a version that made me out to be some awful little whore.  She ultimately read the emails.  Changed his password to his account without telling him so that she, with sole access could go through and find what was there.  She knew the truth.  She would never let me know she knew the truth.  She acknowledged to him that he’d ruined my life.  And she was right.  And sometimes I want to say sorry to her.  Other times I want to scream that she doesn’t deserve him.  She pushed and got her wish and then changed her mind.  Because she loves him? Maybe. Because she’s a control freak?  Maybe.  Because she could not bear the public humiliation that the brand people have believed her whole career is a lie? Maybe.

Three years later, I’m still the ‘silly little bitch’ that fell for someone else’s husband.  That believed a spineless, weak man.  That crossed the line.  But had seen the hurt in him and healed it for a moment.

Three years later, I still can’t fully let him go.  I still answer the phone when it rings. I’m scared of never finding love like that again.  I’m still hurting.  Still angry.  Still broken.  Still full of regret.  Regret for what I did.  Regret for ever meeting him.  Regret for everything I know we’ll never have.

Three years later, I feel that sting on my cheek like it happened seconds ago.

Lisbeth Welsh is a writer who is taking life one day at a time.

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Healing From Numbness

What’s in a name.

Why do regrets over lost love often stop us being happy – and how can we move forward?

Consultant and Senior Lecturer in Old Age Psychiatry, King's College London

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I am happily married, but I have never been able to stop missing my ex partner. The regrets I have affect me every day. My new life is wonderful, but I just can’t be happy. How can I move forward? Anonymous, 38, London.

“Any time gone by was better,” wrote the Spanish poet Jorge Manrique in the 15th century, perfectly capturing what a powerful emotion nostalgia is. This simple line reveals that longing for the past is a universal feeling, experienced by people all over the world throughout history. We remember the past fondly because, being unchangeable, it is also unthreatening – unlike the present and the future. It can be a refuge too, especially when stripped by us of its uglier and more inconvenient truths.

Research into nostalgia has found this emotion to be quite useful: it reduces loneliness (by boosting our sense of social belonging), increases positive self-regard and generates good mood. It can also increase a sense of meaning in life (no small feat), by promoting feelings of social connectedness.

Nostalgia is likely at the heart of your dilemma. Past loves, after all, can all too easily be remembered without their nagging doubts and niggling details. Consequently, remember that those old relationships broke down for a reason. It is important to bear this in mind to avoid idealising a liaison that, being in the past, is uncorrupted by the mundane pressures and little disappointments of daily life.

This article is part of Life’s Big Questions The Conversation’s new series, co-published with BBC Future, seeks to answer our readers’ nagging questions about life, love, death and the universe. We work with professional researchers who have dedicated their lives to uncovering new perspectives on the questions that shape our lives.

Unreliable memories

We are often nostalgic over matters of the heart and particularly tend to think fondly of our first romance. But while the first cut may be “the deepest”, as the Cat Stevens’ song goes, it is only so because early adolescent romances are marinated in hormones and impact a very impressionable young brain. Consequently, like so many other “firsts” in life, a first love leaves an indelible mark.

But that doesn’t mean that we’re doomed to remain in the past. As the American psychologist Nancy Kalish has argued :

Strong emotional memories are not imprints. They do not prevent later bonds from occurring that are just as strong or stronger. They do not determine our behaviour. The choice is ours, as humans, to follow the found person or to let him or her go.

Memories are rarely an accurate guide to the past – it makes sense to be sceptical of them. We constantly pick and choose what to remember. If you want to view your past love as perfect, you are more likely to remember the instances in which your ex was wonderful than the times they were in fact annoying, difficult and outright mean.

Research also suggests that our memories become distorted over time, the more we think and talk about them, the more we focus on certain details that we’re currently interested in, while we forget others. Memory is therefore partly influenced by our own motivations. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, we sometimes even invent completely false memories of things that never happened – no matter how good our memory is.

Difficult love

While the intensity of young romance makes it a very attractive subject for drama, as in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet , your dilemma brings to mind a very different love story: Casablanca .

In this 1942 film, Rick, played by Humphrey Bogart, and Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), reignite the romance they had in Paris before the second world war. Ultimately, however, Rick’s surprisingly high moral standards force him to sacrifice their love in order to help Ilsa and her husband, a resistance hero, flee Vichy-controlled Casablanca. Surrendering a love interest to a rival as part of the war effort doesn’t sound very romantic, but millions of viewers thought it was.

The component in the Casablanca story that is relevant to this question is the fact that Ilsa abandoned Rick in Paris when she learned that her husband had not been killed by the Nazis, as she had mistakenly thought. Ilsa and Rick had been forced apart by difficult life circumstances, as often happens in times of war.

That said, you may want to ask yourself how happy you really are. If a relationship struggles from frequent fights, character incompatibility, or increasing boredom, one has to suspect that yet another attempt to save it would probably have the same outcome. The actors Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton might be a good example of this second category, even though it seems clear that they did love each other very passionately. Taylor even said that “after Richard, the men in my life were just there to hold the coat, to open the door”. Their passion sustained the interest of the public, but it wasn’t enough to sustain their hearts.

Sometimes, breaking up is necessary, but we just can’t bring ourselves to do it because we are scared of feeling regret . Ending a relationship forces us to admit a failure, experience regret and eventually move on rather than remaining in an unhappy status quo forever.

Reunited at last?

Is it, however, ever a good idea to end a relationship because of an ex? Kalish started the Lost Love Project back in 1993 from her base in California State University. The aim was to carry out a survey of men and women who had tried to reunite with their old flames.

In the first phase of the project, she found that two-thirds of the 1,001 young participants had reunited with their high school sweethearts and their success rate in rekindling their love and consolidating it into a stable relationship was 78% – a strikingly high figure.

Many of them were forced to separate when they were young as a result of parental disapproval, or other practical issues. Because of this, Kalish warned parents against dismissing their teenage children’s passions as “just puppy love” . But the second phase of the study revealed that married participants who tried to do the same thing ran into all sorts of perhaps predictable difficulties such as being caught cheating. Only 5% of these lost lovers ended up marrying each other, often remaining in their original marriages.

The prospect of relighting an old flame can be tempting, but it’s not always the best idea. In our internet era, getting in touch with old lovers is much easier than it used to be. There are, in fact, websites specifically dedicated to this purpose. But when either party is in a stable relationship with someone else, approaching an ex with the idea of exploring a possible rekindling of passions past is a risky exercise.

Remember that a new partner can never be superior in every single respect to the old one, who you may have perhaps idealised. The glamorous past beats the mundane present and your ageing new partner, asleep on the sofa, perhaps dribbling a little bit, can’t compete with the young, tanned, and smiling memory of an old flame, set in a happy Mediterranean holiday. And don’t forget that both you and your ex have probably changed since you were together, meaning you may not at all be as compatible as you used to be. In any case, happiness doesn’t reside in the past, not least because humans are not really designed to be happy, something I explore in my latest book “ You are not meant to be happy. So stop trying ”. As a proxy of happiness, nostalgia’s futile efforts to revive the past will be worse than a feeling of hope for the future.

You want to move on, which is the correct attitude after a breakup. There is evidence that any type of continuing involvement with an ex-partner following the dissolution of a relationship, perhaps through social media, for instance, is an obstacle in the healing process . So aiming for a clean cut, if this hasn’t happened already, will be the first step.

Having difficulties in letting go of the memory of a lover may be due to an insecure attachment to adults during our childhood, which in some cases may even lead to internet surveillance of the lost lover. In order to avoid getting stuck in this type of purgatory , one should practise a certain amount of self-discipline and willpower, once a decision to move on has been reached. Therapy can help when willpower is not sufficient.

You can also find inspiration in Bogart’s role in Casablanca and how he let his lover go when he felt there was no satisfactory alternative way forward, and how he relabelled their love affair as something they could both remember and treasure: “We’ll always have Paris.”

To get all of life’s big answers, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value evidence-based news by subscribing to our newsletter . You can send us your big questions by email at [email protected] and we’ll try to get a researcher or expert on the case.

More Life’s Big Questions :

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Philosopher in Italian coronavirus lockdown on how to think possitively about isolation

Happiness: is contentment more important than purpose and goals?

Free thought: can you ever be a truly independent thinker?

Could we live in a world without rules?

Feelings: What’s the point of rational thought if emotions always take over?

Death: can our final moment be euphoric?

Nature: have humans now evolved beyond the natural world, and do we still need it?

Love: is it just a fleeting high fuelled by brain chemicals?

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We all have relationship regrets — and here’s how we can learn from them

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There are probably as many kinds of regrets as there are people in the world, but did you know that most of them fall into four main categories?

For his new book The Power of Regret , writer Daniel H. Pink analyzed what keeps 16,000 people in 105 countries awake at night. When he did, he realized that most fit into four primary buckets: Foundation (not building a stable enough platform for our life); Boldness (not being brave enough to have said or done something); Moral (not making the right ethical decision); and Connection (not staying connected to important people in our lives).

He spoke about these four categories at a virtual TED Membership event — and he explained how we can harness them to create the life we truly want. (Yes, really.) A link to watch is at the bottom of this post, and please consider becoming a TED Member today to access the full event archive.

To understand connection regrets, let me tell you the story of four women, two friendships and a pair of doors.

In the late 1980s, Cheryl Johnson attended Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, where she became fast friends with Jen. Cheryl and Jen belonged to the same sorority and lived in a house with about 40 other women.

Among the group, these two stood out for their seriousness and ambition. Cheryl became president of the sorority; Jen was elected president of the entire student body. They supported each other’s enthusiasms and aspirations and hatched big plans to take on the world.

Shortly after graduation in 1990, Jen married — Cheryl was a bridesmaid — and moved to Virginia, and she invited Cheryl to visit her. Jen wanted Cheryl to meet a friend of her new husband, and she thought this friend might be a good match for Cheryl.

Cheryl was taken aback. Shel been dating someone for two years. “I thought he was the one,” she said, but Jen, said Cheryl, “clearly did not think he was the one” for her. Cheryl politely declined the invitation to visit. No drama. No hard feelings.

Over the next few years, Cheryl and Jen exchanged letters and cards but the letters gradually dwindled and then stopped. Cheryl hasn’t talked to Jen for 25 years. They haven’t seen each other in person since Jen’s wedding. “We didn’t have a falling out of any kind. I just let it kind of drift away,” Cheryl told me. “I regret not having that relationship in my life.” 

In every case, connection regrets share a common plotline: A relationship that was once intact no longer is.

Connection regrets are the largest of the four categories in the deep structure of human regret. They arise from relationships that have come undone or that remain incomplete. The types of relationships that produce them vary. Spouses. Partners. Parents. Children. Siblings. Friends. Colleagues. The nature of the rupture also varies. Some relationships fray. Others rip. A few were inadequately stitched from the beginning.

In every case, these regrets share a common plotline. A relationship that was once intact no longer is. Many times, in many roles, we yearn to close the circle, but doing so requires effort, brings emotional uncertainty, and risks rejection. So we confront a choice: Try to make the relationship whole — or let it remain unresolved?

The third woman in my story is Amy Knobler. In middle school, she met a girl whom I’ll call Deepa. Deepa was a latchkey kid whose parents worked demanding jobs and whose house was blocks from school. Amy and Deepa would head there after classes, forging a friendship in the freedom of an empty house. 

Amy remembers those afternoons as some of the happiest times in her life. “It was everything you think about connecting with a close friend,” she told me.

Amy and Deepa stayed friendly in high school and stayed in touch after graduation as they moved on with college, careers and families. In 2005, Deepa’s husband sent a note to the people in his wife’s life informing them that Deepa had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. 

Amy wanted to call her old friend. Amy put off calling her old friend.

Late one night in December of 2008, Amy received a message from a mutual friend that Deepa’s health had taken a serious downward turn.

The following day, Amy called Deepa’s home to speak with her. The person who answered the phone explained that Deepa had died that morning.

“I will never forget how much I realized in that moment the opportunity that had been lost to me,” Amy said. 

“The need to belong,” the researchers wrote, “is not just a fundamental human motive but a fundamental component of regret.”

People often talk about regrets in terms of doors. Amy has a “closed door” regret — as she told me, the opportunity to restore her connection with Deepa is gone. Cheryl has an “open door” regret — the opportunity to reconnect with her college friend remains.

Both types of regrets nag at us, but for different reasons. Closed door regrets distress us because we can’t do anything about them. Open door regrets bother us because we can, though it requires effort.

In the World Regret Survey, my collection of more than 18,000 individual regrets from people in 109 countries, many participants reported the sense of loss that accompanies a closed door. Likewise, a 2012 study by researchers Mike Morrison, Kai Epstude, and Neal Roese concluded that regrets about social relationships are felt more deeply than other types of regrets because they threaten our sense of belonging. When our connections to others tatter or disintegrate, we suffer. And when it’s our fault, we suffer even more. “The need to belong,” they wrote, “is not just a fundamental human motive but a fundamental component of regret.”

Closed door regrets vex us, because we can’t fix them. It’s over. But doors that cannot budge hide behind them a benefit: They show us how regret can make us better.

A few years after Deepa died, Amy learned that another childhood friend had been diagnosed with cancer. Amy called her frequently. She visited her. They exchanged emails and texts.  

“We maintained a connection up until she died,” Amy told me. “It didn’t make it easier. But I don’t have regrets.”

Relationship rifts — due to insults or betrayals — are more dramatic. But drifts are more common. One day, a connection exists; another day, it’s gone.

While the connection regrets that people reported in the surveys numbered well into the thousands, the specific ways their relationships ended numbered only two — rifts and drifts.

Rifts usually begin with a catalyzing incident, such as an insult, a disclosure, a betrayal. Rifts leave the parties resentful and antagonistic, even though to outsiders the underlying grievance might sound easy to repair.

Drifts follow a muddier narrative. They often lack a discernible beginning, middle or end. They happen almost imperceptibly. One day, the connection exists; another day, it’s gone.

Rifts are more dramatic. But drifts are more common. Drifts can also be harder to mend. Rifts generate emotions like anger and jealousy, which are familiar and easier to identify and comprehend. Drifts involve emotions that are subtler and that can feel less legitimate. And first among these emotions is awkwardness.

But when it comes to perceiving and predicting awkwardness, we’re next-level bunglers. For example, in a 2020 study, Erica Boothby of the University of Pennsylvania and Vanessa Bohns of Cornell University examined a related phenomenon: Our squeamishness about complimenting other people. The prospect of giving compliments, Boothby and Bohns found, can make people skittish. They worry “their awkwardness is on display and that people are noticing — and judging — them for their many flaws and faux pas.” 

In the experiments, people’s predictions — about themselves and others — proved way off. They drastically overestimated how “bothered, uncomfortable, and annoyed” the person receiving their compliment would feel — and underestimated how positively that person would react. It wasn’t awkward at all. 

George Vaillant, a Harvard psychiatrist who headed the longest-running study of well-being for more than 30 years, summarized what he;d learned about human flourishing in these five words: “Happiness is love. Full stop.”

These findings about connection regrets are consistent with the Study of Adult Development at Harvard Medical School, the longest-running examination of lifetime well-being in this history of psychological science. In 1938, researchers at Harvard recruited 268 undergraduate men, and followed them for the next 80 years. The audacious goal was to try to determine why some people flourished in work and life and others floundered.

The Harvard Gazette summarized the study’s findings in 2017:

Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives. . . . Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes. That finding proved true across the board among both the Harvard men and the inner-city participants.

George Vaillant, a Harvard psychiatrist, headed the study for more than 30 years, and in an unpublished manuscript, he reflected on what he’d learned. After eight decades, hundreds of subjects, thousands of interviews, and millions of data points, he could summarize the longest-running examination of human flourishing in five words: “Happiness is love. Full stop.”

What give our lives significance and satisfaction are meaningful relationships. But when those relationships come apart, whether by intent or inattention, what stands in the way of bringing them back together are feelings of awkwardness. We fear that we’ll botch our efforts to reconnect, that we’ll make our intended recipients even more uncomfortable. 

Yet these concerns are almost always misplaced. Sure, we’ll get rebuffed sometimes. But more often, we overestimate how awkward we’ll feel and underestimate how much others will welcome our overtures.

All four core human regrets reveal a need and yield a lesson. With connection regrets, the need is love.

So, this simple problem has an even simpler solution. Shove aside the awkwardness.

When Amy Knobler considers her closed door regret, she wishes she could travel backward in time. She’d assure young Amy “that even though it feels awkward, and it is super uncomfortable and scary, on the other side of it, you will be glad that you went through that experience, not only because you don’t have those unanswered questions in your mind at that point, but also for what it does for the other person.”

All four core human regrets reveal a need and yield a lesson. With connection regrets, the need is love. Not love only in the romantic sense — but a broader version of love that includes attachment, devotion, and community and that encompasses parents, children, siblings and friends.

The lesson of closed doors is to do better next time. The lesson of open doors is to do something now. If a relationship you care about has come undone, place the call. Make that visit. Say what you feel. Push past the awkwardness and reach out.

Excerpted from the new book The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward by Daniel H. Pink. Copyright © 2022 by Daniel H. Pink. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

To learn more, watch his TED Membership event now. PS: By becoming a TED Member today, you’ll not only be supporting TED’s mission to amplify great ideas, but you’ll also have access to our entire archive of amazing events . In the last year, topics have included how our memory works (and why forgetting is totally OK!), the impact that artificial intelligence will have on our lives and the world, and how we can find hope in hopeless times. 

About the author

Daniel H. Pink is the author of five New York Times bestsellers, including his latest, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. His other books include the New York Times bestsellers When and A Whole New Mind -- as well as the #1 New York Times bestsellers Drive and To Sell is Human. They have won multiple awards, have been translated into 42 languages, and have sold millions of copies worldwide. 

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Book Reviews

Love has a ghost of a chance in 'the regrets'.

Michael Schaub

The Regrets

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Rachel, a librarian in Brooklyn, hasn't had the best luck with men. "I'd dated inadvisably before," she admits, "the long-distance architect, the married whiskey distiller, the homeless freegan." But when she sees a beautiful young man lingering at her bus stop, she's hopeful he might be the one to reverse her string of bad luck. Thomas, it turns out, is her perfect match — or he would be, if only he weren't dead.

That's the setup for The Regrets , the dazzling debut novel from Georgia author Amy Bonnaffons. Wildly inventive and daring, her novel is a reflection on the limits of love that's both hilarious and heartbreaking.

The novel opens with Thomas encountering an angel after he and his best friend are killed in a motorcycle accident. It turns out he's met the angel before, as a child, when she visited him in the mistaken belief that he was about to die. Because of that meeting, a mysterious man in an otherworldly office tells Thomas that he's "insufficiently dead ... You lack rupture with your life. You have no exit narrative."

So he's forced to return to Earth for three months while his death is re-processed. He's warned not to seek "any form of self-medication (pharmaceutical, alcoholic, sexual, or otherwise)" or else he'll "incur regrets" — which the man in the office explains as "incursions of the past into the present. Threats to one's temporal integrity. An inability to coexist with oneself."

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But when he sees Rachel, he's instantly infatuated: "The girl with the red lipstick, or the idea of the girl, was a bright vivid gash through my loneliness: the hideous loneliness of the dead, a loneliness I can only describe as both infinite and suffocating, like a loop of musty bandage, layer upon layer of it, tightening as it thickens, deadening as it pains." The two quickly fall for each other, and he eventually tells her about his condition after she notices a gaping, bloodless hole in his chest.

Nonetheless, the two continue their doomed relationship. Rachel can't abide the thought of losing Thomas, even though she knows she will: "Something had shifted in the color resolution of my life: there was this new brightness in it, and in contrast to that brightness everything else seemed dim and unimportant." As Thomas' scheduled time on earth races toward its end, he begins to disappear completely, becoming a ghost with no body at all. They do their best to sustain their connection, hoping in vain that love can overcome the finality of death.

There are a million ways that a novel about a woman engaged in a torrid sexual relationship with a ghost can go wrong, and not many ways it can go right. In the hands of another author, The Regrets could have become something like the movie Ghost as reimagined by Nicholas Sparks. But Bonnaffons resists sentimentality and treacly reflections on love — her novel is open-hearted, but never cloying or dewy-eyed.

That's partly because she writes with a straight face, never indulging in whimsy and always taking her characters seriously. And the writing itself is flawless — it can be difficult to pull off a love story, especially when one of the lovers is a ghost, but Bonnaffons does so with confidence and real insight into what it means to be totally infatuated with another person: "We might as well have been the first man and the first woman: risking everything, learning the limits of the body, figuring everything out from scratch."

While The Regrets is, for obvious reasons, frequently heartbreaking, Bonnaffons also proves to be quite funny, and the humor in the novel keeps it from becoming unbearably sad. "The whole reason heterosexual men need women, besides heterosexual intercourse, is that they need someone to verbalize the world to," Rachel reflects at one point. "Or rather, in whose general direction to verbalize the world. It's like the way cats need a doorstep on which to deposit dead birds." Or when she describes a friend's disastrous attempt at cooking: "Like many things Samira did, it was a generous impulse whose execution was hampered by basic, easy predictable facts about reality."

The Regrets is a miracle of a love story, a brilliant novel that asks perceptive questions about the line between love and (literal) possession, about what we're willing to do for love, and what it feels like to be "photographic negative of a person, an absence given form, a loose ache of consciousness attached to a cheap facsimile of a body."

Love and Relationship Essay

The word ‘love’ is observed to have distinct meanings in various settings and contexts. Different people from various cultural settings would tend to have different perceptions about love. Generally, love refers to some kind of inexplicable feeling which is felt by people towards others, probably those of the opposite sex. Relationship on the other hand would refer to the condition of people being connected or associated with each other.

We have all experienced love at one moment of life, but it is as though there is still much we don’t know about love itself. Humans have always asked inexplicable questions about love such as, “Why do we fall in love?” or “What makes us love others?” We may not necessarily have perfect answers for all the questions regarding love but there is no doubt that we have been closer to the right answers for most of these questions through the perception of psychologists.

For instance, according to love psychologists, the reason as to why we fall in love will depend on our minds. The way our minds perceive love is what comes out to us as love. Sometimes, these perceptions may match with the perceptions of another person and in that case love is certain to be realized.

Different groups of people have different views about love. Some communities would see it as something that would be contained in the eyes while others just associate it with blood thus the observations ‘love is in the eyes of the beholder’ and ‘blood is thicker than water’ respectively.

However, some aspects in life have come up to disqualify these perceptions, making people to search for other alternative explanations. For instance, let us consider the situation of blind people. Does their incapability to see hinder them from loving? More importantly, if love was really contained in the blood, will there be any cases concerning lost identities in life as we can see today?

Having asked ourselves these questions, it would be easy for us to appreciate the psychological view of love that is determined by our minds as the perfect answer to most of the questions we frequently ask ourselves regarding love. The issue of love and what makes people fall in love has been a subject of debate all over the world for a very long time. There may never be false love as some thinkers would observe, but we are all informed of the many uncertainties associated with love nowadays.

Think of someone who is strolling down the street without any specific focus or intention then suddenly, he bumps on a lady and it happens they fall in love at the first sight. How can this situation be explained? There is no other perfect manner we can explain this but through the ‘idea of the mind.’

What had just happened between the two people would depend on their brains. Single people; ones who are not in any relationship will always be in hunt for love and if someone fitting their criteria crosses their path, they will definitely be attracted to them and these feelings would trigger love instantly.

The person in this example fell in love with the lady she met on the street owing to the opportunistic perceptions of his mind that he was single and he needed a lover. This is just what happens to many people in this world as far as love is concerned.

As it would be observed, most people would appear to be crazy in love at the beginning of their relationship. This however is likely to change over the time and that fire would fade away as they continue seeing each other. They can even start having feelings of hate against each other.

This is another stand which can be used to justify the hypothesis in this argument. Most of the times, humans are misguided by their minds to make instant choices about love, instead of taking their time to think of the possible outcomes which are likely to arise later. This way, they end up making the wrong choices in what can be termed as ‘rushed love.’ This is a misunderstood situation that would be characterized by arguments and hate against each other come in the future.

To avoid such situations, psychologists have observed a number of factors for people to consider before thinking of falling in love. First of all, we should try to establish a checklist about the things we expect to see in our future lovers and some of the aspects which can apply in the checklist might include behavior, appearance, and education. A checklist is more likely to guide us to the right people thus sparing us future disappointments in relationships.

Through the observations of this topic, we get to learn the benefits of psychology in helping us come into terms with some behaviors and processes of life. Through psychology, we can gain practical benefits regarding various aspects of life. Psychology is always certain to offer satisfying answers to most of the questions we may frequently ask ourselves about many things facing us in our daily lives.

For instance, in the above case concerning love psychology would provide the right answers and the perfect guideline on how to go about it without regrets. This would help people make the right decisions thus avoiding future disappointments. In this case, we should see the capability of psychology in giving us the perfect guideline about sensitive issues of life.

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Bibliography

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Personal Narrative Essay about Regrets

Regret is the emotion of wishing one had made a different decision because the     consequence of the decision was unfavorable. I've felt the emotion of regret many times have you?    

Regret is a normal and common emotion everyone has when making decisions. No matter whether you sit back and think before making a decision or just jump to it, there's still an equal chance of you regretting your decision later. 

Nobody's perfect, everyone has once made a decision that made them feel a sort of shame, dissatisfaction, disappointment , and even maybe remorse because of past episodes. A past episode that constantly replays in my head and makes me so ashamed and disappointed in myself is the time in middle school me and my best friend were finally accepted in the big friend group with our other school mates . We were so excited it was like our middle school experience was finally going to happen. At times me and my best friend would see how the friend group would constantly mistreat others but we didn't speak up we just let it be but at one point there was no one really left for the friend group to mistreat so they started to turn on my bestfriend and it hurt to see them mistreat the girl that has been my side since day one and I've always had her back but this time it was different because I was so worried about me being bullied next So when my best friend had to suffer alone, I stood quietly.

Although my bestfriend and I are still friends and she always tells me it was fine that I didn't defend her and she says she forgives me every time I apologize for it, that doesn't change the fact that it happened. Looking back at it now there are so many things I could have done to help her. One thing that i shouldve have done was be less selfless. I was too worried about myself being mistreated by the friend group. I turned my back when my friend needed me the most. If I would have just defended her yes i would have gotten mistreated too but at least she wouldn't have been alone. 

I've definitely grown a lot since then and it's now more rare if I'm sitting back while something wrong is happening right in front of me. From that episode I definitely learned to speak up for what's right instead of agreeing with the bad things others were doing. Just the way I turned my back on my best friend just for others validation and so that I wouldn't get mistreated too just makes me feel such shame now. I will never not forget this and I know she won't either but that's the way it is. Some regrets can be forgotten if they're simple and even if they're not simple it's fine because no matter what you do differently next time there's still a chance of you regretting it.

Yes, even though regret is an emotion that doesn't always feel too good and at times makes you feel disappointed in yourself at the end of the time regret helps us learn and it makes us realize we need to think carefully when making decisions and it helps us grow and learn from our mistakes.

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A Summary and Analysis of Kate Chopin’s ‘Regret’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Regret’ is a short story by the American writer Kate Chopin (1850-1904). Chopin wrote ‘Regret’ in September 1894 and it originally appeared in Century magazine the following year, before being reprinted in her 1897 collection A Night in Acadie . This collection met with some hostile reviews, with one critic objecting to the ‘unnecessary coarseness’ of some of the subject-matter.

‘Regret’ is about an unmarried woman, Mamzelle Aurélie, who looks after her neighbour’s children and comes to realise that she deeply regrets never having married and had children of her own. You can read Chopin’s ‘Regret’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis below.

‘Regret’: plot summary

Mamzelle Aurélie is fifty years old and unmarried. She has never considered marriage; indeed, she has never been in love. A man proposed to her when she was twenty but she turned him down. She runs a farm with a number of animals, and she is also religious. But she is quite alone in the world.

One morning, her neighbour, Odile, calls round and asks if Mamzelle Aurélie will look after her four children for her. Odile’s husband is away in Texas, and she needs to visit her mother, who is seriously unwell. Mamzelle Aurélie is not happy about the prospect of caring for somebody else’s children, and she finds it difficult to keep them entertained during the first few days. When she tries to shoo them to bed as she shoos her chickens into the hen-house, the children simply stand there, not understanding.

Mamzelle Aurélie confides to her cook that she would rather manage a dozen plantations than look after four children. She feels as though she is not privy to the special knowledge needed to do the job. However, after two weeks of having the children under her roof, she grows used to it, and stops complaining about having to look after them.

It’s at that point that Odile returns home, and recovers her children. Mamzelle Aurélie notices how still and quiet everything is in her house once the children have done. She starts crying, and barely notices her dog licking her hand.

‘Regret’: analysis

The title of Chopin’s story says it all: ‘Regret’ is about Aurélie’s realisation that, contrary to what she had previously told herself, she does regret never getting married and having children of her own.

Although she has the animals on her farm and her dog Ponto, the closing sentence of the story suggests that she views these as a poor substitute for human company and for having a family of her own. It is only when she reluctantly has to care for another woman’s children that she comes to recognise what a change a family can make to a house.

Aurélie runs a farm by herself (although it’s worth remembering she has African-American servants who help her tend it), and Chopin begins and ends the story by showing how an unmarried woman like Aurélie has had to adopt the manner – and, indeed, the clothes – of a man in order to assert herself in a world in which women were expected to be wives and mothers.

Aurélie is, to all intents and purposes, the ‘man of the house’, and the opening paragraph of ‘Regret’ informs us that she wears a man’s hat when working on the farm and, when it’s cold, an old blue army overcoat (probably once belonging to a Federal soldier – Pamela Knights, in the Oxford World’s Classics edition to Chopin’s stories, suggests Aurélie may have shot a man during the American Civil War and taken his coat).

And then, at the end of the story, Aurélie is described as crying ‘like a man’. She is back where she was: having played mother for a couple of weeks and had a taste of what her life could have been like, if she had opted for the road not taken, she is back to wearing the trousers (or the army coat) on her farm, but not until she has wept thirty years of regret in deep, powerful sobs.

In ‘Regret’, Kate Chopin uses free indirect speech to give us an insight into Mamzelle Aurélie’s thoughts and feelings. Free indirect speech is a narrative technique whereby the third-person narrator adopts the thoughts and words of one of the story’s characters. Consider this excerpt from towards the end of the story:

The excitement was all over, and they were gone. How still it was when they were gone! Mamzelle Aurlie stood upon the gallery, looking and listening.

That interjection (‘How still it was when they were gone!’) belongs to Mamzelle Aurélie rather than the impersonal third-person narrator, who would not utter such an emotive exclamation. The effect of this is that we get sudden and momentary bursts of Mamzelle Aurélie’s emotions into the more staid and objective narrative provided by that third-person narrator.

Of course, even when we realise that the observation belongs to Mamzelle Aurélie, it is ambiguous. Is it a cry of relief (finally, some peace!) or a lament (she has, after all, grown used to the noise and disorder of having the children around by this point)?

In many ways, it is both: she has been so busy looking after Odile’s children that it is only now they have gone and she has some time to catch her breath (and she finds herself alone again for the first time in two weeks) that she realises what a difference they had made to the place.

And hot on the heels of that comes the perhaps surprising realisation, or epiphany , that she liked having them around and that she is suddenly newly aware of her own solitude – or, more than solitude, her loneliness .

An epiphany is a realisation or revelation experienced by a central character in the story, and is especially common in more impressionistic stories like Chopin’s; indeed, an epiphany often provides a similar function to a plot twist or denouement in a more traditional (i.e., plot-driven) story.

A character comes to realise something about themselves and their own life, and for Mamzelle Aurélie, that realisation is that she regrets not marrying and having children (she did have a willing suitor thirty years before, we learn at the beginning of the story).

The final paragraph of ‘Regret’ is laden with symbolism and meaning. The fact that Aurélie doesn’t rush to clear up the mess the children have left behind them indicates that she wants to keep alive the memory of their time with her; she knows that once she has cleaned and tidied up, all physical traces of the children having been there will have gone.

Meanwhile, the ‘evening shadows’ which are ‘creeping and deepening around her solitary figure’ symbolise her advancing years and the twilight years of old age that lie ahead of her, which she is destined to spend alone. This had already been foreshadowed by the ‘red sunset and the blue-gray twilight’ in the preceding paragraph. And the fact that she doesn’t even notice Ponto, her dog, licking her hand shows that her animals are not, after all, sufficient company for her: only children can make her feel alone.

However, epiphanies in the stories of many modernist short-story writers (others that spring to mind include Anton Chekhov and James Joyce) are sometimes more ambiguous in what they signify. Although Aurélie feels regret at not having a family of her own when Odile and the children have gone, she was only minding Odile’s children temporarily. It’s easy to want something when it’s taken away from us.

But should we really weigh two weeks of (eventual) pleasure in the company of another woman’s children against thirty years of independence and singlehood? There were clearly reasons why Aurélie decided not to accept that earlier marriage proposal, and she may even believe that she now regrets taking such a decision.

But will she still feel the same way the next day, or the following week? She got used to the children being in the house, so this implies she will just as readily grow used to being on her own again. Regrets aren’t always as neat as that. We might regret not doing something one day and then be thankful we didn’t the next.

As so often with her short fiction, Kate Chopin leaves us wondering about the afterlives of her characters once we have finished reading her words.

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How to Get Over Regrets and Move Forward

Barbara is a writer and speaker who is passionate about mental health, overall wellness, and women's issues.

Dr. Sabrina Romanoff, PsyD, is a licensed clinical psychologist and a professor at Yeshiva University’s clinical psychology doctoral program.

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• Why Regrets Are Harmful

The Positive Side of Regrets

What are our most intense regrets, how can you stop thinking about regrets.

• Ways to Move Forward

When we feel disappointment and sorrow over what might have been or we wish we could change a choice we made in the past, we have regrets.

Often, a sense of shame accompanies our regrets. As these feelings are so uncomfortable, we avoid them at all costs. Or endless regret always stays with us. In the latter case, regret might haunt us and prevent us from progressing.

For example, maybe you worked too much while your children grew up. Consequently, they are not close to you, and you are filled with regret about it. You feel stuck because your kids and your grandchildren aren’t in touch. You blame your past actions.

Letting go of regret is important for your mental, emotional and physical health. Learn more about how regrets are harmful, the positive side of regrets, what our most intense regrets are, how to stop thinking about regrets, and ways to get over regrets and move forward.

How Regrets Are Harmful

Regrets can be harmful when we don’t want to accept them. For example, maybe you didn’t defend your friend who was accused of saying something derogatory. You didn’t speak up at the time to clear their name.

You push down those feelings of guilt and embarrassment because they are unpleasant. You end up feeling disappointed in yourself and don’t want to be reminded of the incident.

Or you remember the situation all too well, but don’t know how to overcome your regret. Imaging studies reveal that when we feel regret increased activity takes place in an area of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex. Regret can have adverse effects on your mind.

Various psychological problems result from regret. Repetitive negative thought patterns and constant rumination can lead to stress, anxiety, and depression . This kind of mental and emotional pain also affects our bodies .

A recent study shows another negative effect self-blame has on our bodies. Scientists found that inducing self-blame leads to increases in shame and guilt as well as increases in pro-inflammatory cytokine activity. According to Cleveland Clinic, inflammation is a symptom of many diseases like arthritis, cancer, and heart disease.

When we reflect on regrettable choices we made in the past, that’s a good thing. We grow from reflection and can learn from our missteps. Inspired to be better, we improve on our decision-making so we don’t repeat our mistakes.

Another positive aspect of regret is it can move you closer to being your best self. A study about people’s most enduring regrets was published in the journal Emotion where scientists looked at the connection between regret and an individual’s self-concept.

The results showed people acted more quickly to cope with regrets when they fell short in their duties and responsibilities than when they fell short in their goals and aspirations.  Therefore, regrets about their ideal selves were not resolved. People were more likely to regret not living up to being that ideal person and using their full potential.

In the first study to analyze key predictors in a single model, scientists looked at factors that affect the intensity of regret over a lifetime.

They found that people had a greater frequency of regrets about the lack of action (inaction) they took in their lives.

Yet, when these individuals reviewed their life paths, the intensity of regrets about inaction did not cause greater grief. People felt more intense regret about the actions they did take.

In looking at these actions, scientists discovered that the intensity of regret was greatest in this order:

• About decisions that broke participants’ own life rules
• About decisions related to social life domains rather than non-social domains
• About decisions that lacked justification

Press Play for Advice On Dealing With Regret

Hosted by therapist Amy Morin, LCSW, this episode of The Verywell Mind Podcast , featuring best-selling author Daniel Pink, shares how to cope with the feeling of regret. Click below to listen now.

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It might seem like your brain is playing the regret song on repeat. You may compare yourself to friends and claim, “I’d be rich now if I went to a better college.” Or you play the what if game by saying, “If only I didn’t post that angry remark on Twitter, I wouldn’t have lost my job.”

Here are suggested ways to get out of your head and overcome that cycle of regret, self-blame, and shame:

• Turn off rumination
• Choose mindfulness
• Take deep breaths
• Start a new hobby

Laurel Healy, LCSW, says, “If thoughts turn to self-blame and are serving no purpose, it’s important not to interrupt them. But we can train our minds to move on by distracting ourselves, meditating, talking to a friend and bringing ourselves into the present moment.”

Ways to Move Forward When You’re Feeling Regretful

If you're feeling regret, here are some steps you can take to move forward:

Have Empathy for Yourself

Let’s say you dropped out of college to work so you could buy a car more quickly. Now you believe getting that college degree would’ve been a better choice. Maybe you've been feeling regretful over this decision and feel like you're not on par with your peers.

Show yourself the same grace and empathy that would provide a loved one if they were feeling regretful about a past action.

Put yourself in your younger self's shoes. Ask yourself questions about your past choice. Did you do the best you could under the circumstances? Was your decision based on the maturity you had at the time? Answering these questions can help provide some insight into your decision.

Remind yourself that people can only make decisions based on the information they have at the time. If you did the best you could with the knowledge you had, try not to beat yourself up about your decision.

Cultivate Self-Compassion

Researchers at UC Berkeley conducted a study about self-compassion and regrets. Those participants who viewed their regrets with self-compassion felt they learned from their mistakes. With a positive adjustment, they were more motivated to improve themselves than the other groups.

In the study, researchers invited adults to write about their biggest regrets with kindness and self-compassion. Other participants were instructed to journal about their regrets and focus on their positive qualities as they related to self-esteem. The control group wrote about a hobby they enjoyed participating in.

Those participants who viewed their regrets with self-compassion felt they learned from their mistakes and were more motivated to improve themselves than the other two groups.

Forgive Yourself

You’re not letting yourself off the hook if you forgive yourself and let go of regret. Self-forgiveness involves separating your far-from-perfect actions from who you are as a person.

By forgiving yourself, you are recognizing that you are a worthy person and that we all err because we’re human.

Steps you can take to cultivate self-forgiveness:

• Acknowledge the poor decision
• Offer yourself compassion
• Learn the lesson
• Repair or make amends
• Release regret

Write About Your Regrets

You can try journaling or writing a letter to the person you hurt. You can also write a letter to yourself about your regrets. First, write in detail about the event and accept what happened. Then write about what you learned from it and what you can do differently in the future. Lastly, write about what could make this situation better now.

Regarding the last part, you can’t go back in time. But maybe you can do something good now. As an example, that father who worked too much and whose family isn’t close could now volunteer with young kids at a local Boys and Girls Club.

Seek Mental Health Counseling

If you’ve been obsessing about your regrets, this fixation can prevent you from healing. Consider counseling if you feel like you're unable to move forward. Mental health practitioners have a variety of therapies that might assist you.

For example, cognitive-behavioral therapy can help you disrupt negative thought patterns that are involved with regret. It can help you learn how to create more positive behaviors.

A Word From Verywell

If you're feeling regret over something from your past, know you're not alone in feeling this way. Everyone has something (or many things) that they regret. However, there are ways to heal and move forward by showing yourself understanding. If that's too difficult, enlist the help of a mental health professional . A therapist can help you manage feelings of regret so they no longer hold you back.

Coricelli G, Critchley HD, Joffily M, O'Doherty JP, Sirigu A, Dolan RJ. Regret and its avoidance: a neuroimaging study of choice behavior .  Nat Neurosci . 2005;8(9):1255-1262. doi:10.1038/nn1514

Dickerson SS, Kemeny ME, Aziz N, Kim KH, Fahey JL. Immunological effects of induced shame and guilt .  Psychosom Med . 2004;66(1):124-131. doi:10.1097/01.psy.0000097338.75454.29

The Cleveland Clinic. Inflammation .

Davidai S, Gilovich T. The ideal road not taken: The self-discrepancies involved in people's most enduring regrets .  Emotion . 2018;18(3):439-452. doi:10.1037/emo0000326

Towers A, Williams MN, Hill SR, Philipp MC, Flett R. What Makes for the Most Intense Regrets? Comparing the Effects of Several Theoretical Predictors of Regret Intensity .  Front Psychol . 2016;7:1941. Published 2016 Dec 15. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01941

Zhang JW, Chen S. Self-Compassion Promotes Personal Improvement From Regret Experiences via Acceptance .  Pers Soc Psychol Bull . 2016;42(2):244-258. doi:10.1177/0146167215623271

By Barbara Field Barbara is a writer and speaker who is passionate about mental health, overall wellness, and women's issues.

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Advanced Essay #3: Regret and miscellaneous emotions.

The things that make people who they are can be very complicated, being built from many experiences and events. People like to say things about how the past is just the past and it doesn't affect them now, or about how they do not have any regrets. Regrets are a necessary part of becoming a better person. The regrets and events of our life are what make us, us. We wouldn't be the same person if we lived in a vacuum with no outside forces acting upon it. We are based on events and those events define who we are. How we react to trauma, how we choose to stand once we fall make us who we are, and the idea that events in your life don't affect who you are as a person is incredibly naive. Think about how childhood traumas still affect people well into adulthood. The idea of having no regrets is the ideal, but God only knows I have regrets. I would be a completely different person if I went to a different high school or elementary school. Even the little things shape who I am as a person like whether or not I am friends with someone.

There are many moments I regret, believe me. One regretful memory that stands out is my first girlfriend all the way back in 5th grade. As with all 5th grade romances, it was the end all be all of human creation, we were destined for each other, clearly the universe served no other purpose than to put us together that fateful class. We were disgusting, braces filled, balls of pre- pubescence , and man was it vile looking back. In the moment it was pretty good, but the standards weren’t that high. I took this girl out on our first date and we went to dinner, then a movie, a classic, nothing could go wrong. I was wrong about that. We first went to dinner with a parental escort, which was as painfully awkward as it sounds. After our meal had arrived, I devoured it with extreme incompetence. How do you improperly eat one may ask? I am not exactly sure myself, but I am certain that I was missing the prime objective of landing food in my mouth. I then proceeded into the bathroom and spent way too much time in there defiling it. We then went to the movie, we watched some romantic comedy with Channing Tatum. Several times during the movie I tried to slide my hand over her shoulder with the classic yawn technique, and boy that didn’t work. We eventually took a very awkward car ride home, I spent the whole time wallowing in my failure and awkwardness. Getting out of the car and entering my house was such sweet relief. I thought I was gonna regret that day for the rest of my life because of how awkward I was. I did end up regretting that evening in many ways after, but not because of how I acted, but because who I was with. The girl I was with turned out to be crazy, and not in the way that's manageable or funny. She thought that the Earth was 6000 years old, that Alaska was a Country,  and that evolution wasn’t real. Regret never works out the way you think it will.

Last year in World History we learned a lot about various religions and faiths, we read texts from beliefs. This quote stood out to me, even looking back a year later. “And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life.” -Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha  The author is very good at describing how the bad and good make up people, and how regrets and bad emotions are necessary. We feel all these emotions and they make us who we are. Regret is an important part of our lives. This quote opts for a ying and yang style where you need both light and dark, good and bad. We need both to not only survive, but to thrive. In most high schools it is becoming a running joke how much you regret who you were in middle school, or even as a freshman. We acknowledge our regret in a healthy comedic way. We understand regret is important in this way, we know things were bad and that things are getting better.

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• Sample essay on regret

            I was sitting with my aunt the other day after a family dinner outside in the backyard of our house. My parents had invited the whole family for dinner and several people were inside my house at that time. I wanted to get some fresh air so I stepped outside the back door to find my aunt sitting on one of the chair, a cigarette in her hand and a glass of wine in another.

            “Come, sit with me,” she said. I could tell that she was a little inebriated but I liked her. She had always been nice to me and I remember having some good times at her house with I was young.

            “Tell me,” she said. “Do you have any regrets in your life? I mean, I know you are still young but is there anything in the past that you have done that you regret today?”

            I told her that no, I was pretty satisfied with my life and how I had been living life.          

My aunt chuckled and said, “Ah to be young again. When I was your age, the world was so perfect. Everything was so easy.”

“What about you?” I asked her. “Do you regret anything in your life?”

My aunt went on to tell me that it was just a few days ago that someone had asked her this same question and she had told them the same answer that I had just given her: that no, in the past 35 years that she had been alive, she did not have any regrets in life. If she had a chance to live her life all over again, she would live it exactly the same, even making all the mistakes that she had made in her life. Of course, there were several things that were not ideal in her life and she had had some very bad experiences, but she said that she would have lived them exactly the same because that is what made her the person she was.

However, this is when my aunt started to cry. I asked her if she was ok and she said that she had lied to her friend the other day. She said that there was something that she truly did regret in her life and she wanted to get it off her chest. She asked me if I was willing to listen, and when I nodded my head, she started telling me her story.         

She was in high school when she first fell in love. It was something magical, like out of a fairy tale. She was sitting in class one day when a boy walked into the classroom and she immediately fell in love with him. It was – she assured me – love at first site. He had just recently moved to the neighborhood and it was his first day at school. My aunt saw him for the first time and fell in love.

She told me their story as to how they started talking and started to like each other; how he asked her out for a date and she said yes; their first kiss and their prom dance together. She told me that it was the best time of her life. They were completely in love with each other and could not bear to be away from each other for more than a few hours. They would constantly be in touch with each other over the phone, as well as through online chatting and emails. That was the time when there were no smartphones but they did have cellphones as well as dial-up Internet. She would log on to her AOL account every night and they would chat online until she would fall asleep.

Everything was going perfectly for them, until a terrible accident happened.

My aunt woke up one morning to find a message from her boyfriend telling him that he was in the hospital and that her parents had been in an accident. My aunt rushed to the hospital and by the time she got there, her boyfriend’s mother had passed away.

It was a terrible time for her boyfriend. He had been extremely close to his mother and they had shared a very loving bond. Having his mother pass away completely destroyed him. His whole demeanor changed. He went from being someone who was always smiling and making jokes to someone who would sit alone in the corner and brood.

My aunt told me that this was when things started to go bad between the two of them. Her boyfriend stopped picking up his phone and he would reply to her texts very late. This was something that infuriated my aunt because her relationship with her boyfriend had completely changed. They used to text each other all the time and now she left without him. This is when things took the turn for the worse.

My aunt was quite young at the time, around 18 years old, and she admitted that she was insecure. Various problematic images started to come to her head, such as that her boyfriend was ignoring her because he was actually cheating on her. She started to send him these crazy messages about how he was ignoring her and how she felt like he had left her alone. This did not help them in the relationship, as their relationship became even more strained.

One day something happened that broke the camel’s back. My aunt’s boyfriend had picked her up and they were going out on a date. Things had been tense between them and they thought that they might try to start anew after the rocky road the past few days. They were on the road when they started arguing again. My aunt became really furious and she threw her phone inside the car, which hit the windshield and shattered it. They almost got into an accident.

After that, it was over between them. They stopped seeing each other and did not talk to each other for many years.

My aunt told me that that was something that she regretted the most in her life. She met that boy again several years later and they had a conversation like two mature adults. That was when my aunt realized that the young boy at the time was going through such a terrible time. He had just lost his mother suddenly in a car accident and it was extremely difficult for him to cope with all of that. My aunt did not realize all that and she did not understand him at all.

She told me that she regrets the way that she acted. She wished that she could go back and listen to the boy more; to understand what was going through in his mind and heart; to be more empathetic; and to be a much better girlfriend and a kinder, gentler human being.

“You say that your life is perfect right now,” my aunt said at the end. “But you are going to face some very difficult times in your life. I want you to learn from my mistakes and please me more mature about how you handle your relationships, especially if it is the love of your life. If you can do that, you would truly not have any regrets in your life.”

Essay on Biggest Regret In Life

Students are often asked to write an essay on Biggest Regret In Life in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Biggest Regret In Life

Understanding regret.

Regret is a sad feeling we get when we think we made a wrong choice. It’s like wishing we could go back in time and do things differently. The biggest regret in life can vary from person to person.

Examples of Regret

For some, the biggest regret could be not studying hard in school. They might wish they had tried harder to get better grades. Others may regret not saying ‘I love you’ to someone special. These regrets can make us feel sad, but they also teach us valuable lessons.

Learning from Regret

Regret can be painful, but it can also help us grow. It teaches us to make better choices in the future. So, instead of feeling sad about our regrets, we should try to learn from them.

Living Without Regret

The best way to live without regret is to make good choices. Think about what you want, and work hard to achieve it. This way, you won’t have any regrets in the future. Remember, it’s your life, and only you can make it regret-free.

250 Words Essay on Biggest Regret In Life

Regret is a feeling of sadness or disappointment over something that has happened or been done, especially when it involves a loss or a missed opportunity. It is a common human emotion that everyone experiences at different times and for different reasons.

The Biggest Regret in Life

The biggest regret in life varies from person to person. For some, it could be a missed chance to study at a dream school. For others, it might be a lost opportunity to say the right words at the right time. This regret often leaves a lasting impact on our lives, shaping our future decisions and actions.

Living with Regret

Living with regret can be tough. It can make us feel stuck in the past and prevent us from moving forward. It’s like carrying a heavy bag that slows us down. It can also affect our self-esteem and make us doubt our abilities.

Despite the pain, regret can also be a good teacher. It can help us learn from our mistakes and make better choices in the future. It can guide us to avoid the same pitfalls and help us grow as individuals.

Overcoming Regret

Overcoming regret is all about accepting the past and learning to let go. It’s important to remember that everyone makes mistakes and it’s okay. The key is to not let regret stop us from enjoying the present or fearing the future. Instead, use it as a stepping stone to become better and stronger.

In conclusion, the biggest regret in life can be a painful experience, but it can also be a valuable lesson. It’s all about how we choose to handle it.

500 Words Essay on Biggest Regret In Life

What is regret.

Regret is a feeling of sadness, repentance, or disappointment over something that has happened or been done. It’s a feeling we get when we think that our present situation could be better or happier if we had done something different in the past.

Understanding Life’s Biggest Regret

The biggest regret in life can be different for everyone. It can be a missed chance, a wrong choice, or even not saying something when it was important. It’s a heavy feeling that stays with us, reminding us of a path not taken or a choice not made.

The Impact of Regret

Regret can have a strong impact on our lives. It can make us feel sad and stuck. We may keep thinking about the ‘what ifs’ and ‘if onlys’, which can stop us from enjoying the present. It can also lead to feelings of guilt and sadness.

Even though regret can be tough, it can also teach us a lot. It can push us to make better choices in the future. It can make us realize what truly matters to us. In this way, regret can help us grow and become better people.

Letting Go of Regret

Letting go of regret is not always easy, but it’s very important. We need to accept that we can’t change the past. What’s done is done. We should focus on the present and the future. We should remember that everyone makes mistakes and it’s okay. What’s more important is to learn from them and move on.

In the end, the biggest regret in life is a very personal thing. It can be different for everyone. But no matter what it is, it’s important to remember that we can learn from it and let it go. Life is full of ups and downs, and it’s okay to make mistakes. After all, that’s how we learn and grow.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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Free Essays Art And Entertainment Shows And Events Regrets Of Love And Broken Heart

Essay About Regrets Of Love And Broken Heart

• Shows And Events Dating Body Art

Broken Heart Analysis Essay Preview: Broken Heart Analysis Report this essay “The Broken Heart” written by John Donne sets a mood that reveals the regrets of love. It allows you to see how vulnerable the heart can be in dealing with love. Its theme is the pradatory nature of love and the powerlessness of the heart once it has been devoured by love. He makes love seem as if its an evil thing that can overtake you without warning and if your not carful enough, you can e hurt very quickly!Donne also reveals how he was caught up in the traps that love seemed to have set up for him and was permanently hurt by it.

In the firt stanza of Donnes poem, there is a forshadowing of how long it can take for a heart to be swept up then dropped by love.”he is stark mad who ever says thay he hath been in love an hour.” This reveals that in his opinion, no one can love long. He makes love seem like a terrible sickness and its supported when he says that he has has the “plague” of love.

In the second stanza of Donnes poem, it reveals the characteristics of love. Its a predatory creature that “swallows us whole and never chaws”. “He is a tyrant pike, our hearts the fry.” THese two quote reveal the predatory nature of love. lines 9-12 reveals the vulnerabilty of the heart and once it has been hurt by love, theres no other past grief

that can compare to it. The previuos stanzas gave the violant side of love and had a very masculine tone, whereas th mood suddenly changesand becomes more reminisful, it justifies the first two lines in the second stanza and proves how vulnerable the heart can be. “Ah what trifle is a heart, if once into loves hands it come!” These words came from

him because he has experienced the hands of love. “I brought a heart into a room but from the room I carried none.”This proves how vulnerable the heart can be because he was once vulnerable to it and left broken hearted. “More Pity unto me:but love , alas,At one first blow did shiver it to glass.”THis remenicful stanza basically tells the story of Donnes

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'Regrets Of Love And Broken Heart,' Free Educational Essays , July 7, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://www.freeessays.education/regrets-of-love-and-broken-heart-essay/ . [Accessed: 16-April-2024 ]

Free Educational Essays. (July 7, 2021). Regrets Of Love And Broken Heart . [Online]. Available at: https://www.freeessays.education/regrets-of-love-and-broken-heart-essay/ [Accessed: 16-April-2024 ]

Home / Essay Samples / Life / Regret / My Biggest Regret In Life

My Biggest Regret In Life

• Category: Life , Sociology
• Topic: Personal Experience , Personal Life , Regret

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