To ask what your biggest regret in life is?

[SylviaPlath1984]

Or even what you feel you might regret in the future if you don't do it soon?

I regret not taking school more seriously or trying harder, not making more of myself.

What about you?

Not emigrating when I’d the chance to do so. Taking notice of people with bad intent or willing to hurt me.

I regret so many things, going all the way back to childhood. If I could start again, I do most of it differently....

Getting into debt in my 20's - I didn't have a clue and earnt fairly good money, but I never saved and took out consolidation loan after consolidation loan, credit cards and store cards. All rather silly spending rather than anything serious like a gambling habit. The debt got to 36k by my mid 30's and seemed like it would be impossible to pay off. I was very lucky in so much I met my now husband. After about a year together I told him what situation I was in and he paid it all off for me (I have since paid him back when I came into some money some 10 years later). He never wanted to be paid back but his only stipulation was that I never get into any debt ever again and apart from our joint mortgage I haven't. I now have a really good pension and savings. I owe him so much for not judging and helping me. I now only buy what I can afford and realise my previous spending was related to my self worth.

@annie987

Getting into lots of debt at a young age. Almost finished paying it off now at the grand old age of 42! The things we could have done if we hadn’t been paying that back. Had nothing to show for it either!

How did you not know that by the time you were 16 ....?!

@NotEver0Unless you've been there nobody would understand this fully. Sadly I do understand your thoughts, there's so little support and just not even a feint trace of our old adult life, it is simply existing, exceptionally isolating and hard going. I fear for the future constantly...

@willithappen

My biggest regret is being so focussed on boyfriends from a teenage age. To the point I lost out on good opportunities. I'm 28 now, I know I still have time ahead of me but yeah. I went to the university nearest me so I could stay home and be with me boyfriend at the time (who of course was cheating on me the whole time). Got accepted to all my choices and realistically would have moved to Edinburgh and went to halls if boyfriend wasn't in the picture.

Went to work at a summer camp in America shortly after, best experience of my life, but of course I got involved with someone over there too. Most intense summer romance, love at first sight type pthing. Turns out he wasn't the best either (I have a whooole story on this). I was meant to go back to camp the following year but decided not to because the guy I had met was continue to pursue me (long, intense emails declaring love). I knew if I went back I'd have gone back to him and felt at the time that I needed to avoid that and move on. So yeah, never went back to that camp.
It's shut down now, or I'd have tried to get back a couple years ago.
I also fell pregnant with him, ended up having an abortion because of the distance, how he was, how young I was and how I felt at the time. That is 100% the biggest regret of my life.
I'm now in the happiest relationship but unfortunately have been unable to fall pregnant and doing IVF. I will always feel this is my karma for the abortion.

It's funny how regrets pan out, because if you'd had that baby you might easily be on another thread now, about being connected to some weirdo control freak for the rest of your life because he fathered your DC.

It sounds as though you trusted your gut and did the right thing in difficult circumstances. Congratulations! If you hadn't, you wouldn't now be in the happy relationship that you've found.

Please try not to think of karma as a spiteful punishment. You're still young and you're in a much better place now. Good luck. X

topcat2014 I’m so sorry that it didn’t work out as you wished. That must be incredibly hard for you.

@Peanutbutterandbananatoastie

Plus I wish I’d slept with more people and tried some of the more fun drugs

I caught up on all that in my 40s 😋

Similar to previous posters in that I wish I wasn’t so obsessed with boys/ having a boyfriend during my teen years. I had no self esteem or self worth and so felt that boys attention gave me what I needed. I know now that it was my issues making me think I needed that. To say it’s a regret is difficult tho because it’s who I was as a person, I wish I’d had a lot more self value.

I feel like I’m only just now getting to know who I am, and I’m 30.

I don’t want to look back in 20/30/50 years and regret anything else, so I’m trying to live my life the way I want to now.

I regret the person I married and had DC with. I got lovebombed by a narcissist after a bad childhood and was engaged to him after 4 months and married after 6. You can divorce them but you are tied to them for life if you love your DC. And if you fear for your DC safety around them, you let a part of yourself die by spending time with them just to make sure the DC are okay.

I also regret giving up so easily when things were hard in corporate jobs. I should have realised it was down to my childhood conditioning to naturally think that everyone thought I was shit or was laughing at me. I had a very low threshold to give up as the particular glasses I was wearing interpreted everything and everyone as against me - when really the corporate world is just a vey transactional place and it was never personal

Not doing better at school and getting decent qualifications.

Not cutting out toxic family relatives sooner.

Not realising the extent of my alcohol problem sooner.

I wish. I had better self esteem and had not allowed boys / men to treat me badly. I wish I had had the confidence to do what I really wanted to do and was good at. I regret not being able to tell people how I feel. But actually life is good as long I don't think about things too much or in fact face up to them

@ArabellaScott

I REGRET NOTHING

Is that you, Edith?

@Iamtheway me too with regard to leaving a bad marriage I was too scared about him having unsupervised access to DCs but then I think thousands of women have the same fear but they still manage to leave so
I blame myself. Still trying to leave and eldest is 20 next month. What have I done.

Getting depressed in my early 40s and investing a 6 figure sum in a really dodgy business venture, as I thought it was a way out. Lost it all. Lucky enough to be able to survive it financially, but I do think about it often and berate myself for being so stupid.

@Notanotherhun

Having a child.

That’s serious, I’m hope you’re seeking help.

Selling my house in Farnham. Worst financial decision I ever made

I wish that I had bought the agency that delivered most of my work 20 years ago because it was sold to an idiot who prioritised having children with her second husband over keeping a top flight team fully employed. She wasn't even good at collecting on invoices. New business... she didn't do it.

@Cam2020

This is such an important message to teach our daughters. Be a structural engineer, not the administrator.

Some of us 'administrators' are doing fine thanks and chose this path over the many others available because they wanted to do it.

Oh don't be so prickly. I've been an administrator in my time too and it's a perfectly ok job but that wasn't my point. It's important that girls are brought up knowing that they don't have to be a nurse/secretary/receptionist/beautician etc and that they should explore options that will earn them serious money.

Starting smoking as a teen. It took me 25 years to kick the disgusting habit. Plucking my bloody eyebrows to death in the 90s. Wasting my youth thinking I wasn’t pretty or good enough. And the biggie - having a boob job 20 years ago.. What an idiot. All through a lack of confidence... Don’t you wish you could back and a have a word with your younger self?

I regret staying with my ex. I should never have dated him in the first place, and if I could go back in time to do all again, while retaining my knowledge of how it all panned out, I'd seriously make different choices.

Age 14, and moving to the upper high school to do O levels, that would be a good point to begin again. I'd insist on the first choice I had and not give in to my parents wanting me in the so called elite group. I would probably have had better results, and certainly would not have picked those A levels I bombed. I'd have a serious career by now, and a better partner

I wish I had had another child .

I wish I had known more about career choices to do with law .Nothing explained at careers advice .

Nothing else really I have had a good work life balance and a successful job despite no degree.

I regret not being as paranoid as I should have been about monitoring both twins' hearbeats and mine whilst in hospital. They reassured me it was tricky to track all, turned out they did not say my daughter was at risk of a difficult position and she sadly died shortly after an crash section. If they had shared that info, it would have been so different.

The breakdown of my marriage. Not working on it when I knew there were issues. The divorce has been horrendous and the ripple out effect of the fallout just keeps on going.