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?

to settle in uk is my biggest regret in life and I cannot turn the clock bacxk

Agree with crisps , Midnight Library by Matt Haig , everyone should read it, it really makes you think.

I will regret letting my ex and his mother bully me out of what I thought was going to be my forever home.
I regret being way to easy going about things to the point where I'm a push over. That is about to change...........

Not recognising my worth, which had a knock-on effect in so many other areas of my life :-

Pouring my heart and soul into relationships with abusive, incompatible, and draining men.

Not having the guts to push myself career-wise despite my capabilities because I feared rejection.

Getting into a motherload of debt to distract myself from my dissatisfaction.

I'm 42 now and married to a wonderful man, have a job I love and I'm debt-free - life is better than I ever could have hoped, but I can't help but look back and feel regret about the years I wasted, stuck in inertia and crippled by low self-esteem when objectively I had everything going for me.

That grandma who loved me and was desperate for me to meet someone lovely after my ex h’s affair never got to meet my amazing dh whom I met 8 months after her passing.

Moving up North. Miss my family and home town so much but house prices are so expensive down south I don’t think I’ll be able to afford to move back down.

Wish I had more life experiences as a teenager. Didn’t really go parties or meet boys.

Wish I got into a better career. Really wish I could retrain as a dietician but have done a degree already and am scared of going back to uni again and being skint now that I have children and a house.

Regret marrying my husband. We are such different people and want different things.

@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.

Please, please don't feel that the karma for your abortion was that you are now trying IVF. You know the two aren't related.

I had a MMC, in fact 2, but the first time I felt it was karma for my abortion aged 19. It wasn't !

@ElMacchiato

Agree with crisps , Midnight Library by Matt Haig , everyone should read it, it really makes you think.

I've just ordered on Amazon. Only £5 at the moment

I regret asking my mum to please only phone once a week (unless there was an emergency) and I would ring her once a week. She used to ring at tea time every day... And now, aged 77, hoping my own dd will ring me, I am consumed with guilt over how unhappy I made her. I miss my mum.

I bitterly regret meeting and marrying my ex husband. He has destroyed me and it's taken me 8 years to feel even remotely normal again. I regret not going to uni. I regret being a parent pleaser. I wish I had done a lot of things differently. I don't think there is any point in dwelling though. I'll make the most of going forward instead!

Wasting almost 10 years and counting of my life with someone who will never give a damn about me or his kids. Like being drained by a leech physically, mentally and financially. The false promises and pure disregard to us all around him. I regret not being a bigger and better person I know I'm weak.

Allowing a boyfriend I had at uni to completely distance myself from most of my college friends (he was ridiculously jealous as some were ex boyfriend's). 20 years on they're all still very close.

@thegreylady that really makes me want to give you a hug and I am not a hugging type person at all. I am sure your mum would not want you to feel guilty.

Not doing the a levels I wanted to do and being persuaded to do different ones

Not travelling straight after school and backpacking around the world. So saying, I couldn’t have afforded it either but I wish I had done it like others I know did. Instead I did the dutiful thing of getting married young and tying myself to a mortgage. Coming to the end now though, and the then DP is an ExDP and finances are better, so things are looking up.

.........that DP died so young, and hasn't seen our children grow up.

@ElMacchiato

Agree with crisps , Midnight Library by Matt Haig , everyone should read it, it really makes you think.

Hmm. I found it obvious and trite, personally.

I used to have a lot of regrets but I'm working on letting go of them I think everything flows along like a river and you just have to go with it and let the past flow away.

Not getting maths gcse.
Not taking up a couple of career opportunities in my early 20s
I left a job and went freelance so didn’t have job to go back to after having DD. I wish I’d now stayed and gone back after Mat leave.

Basically all mine are career based as I have never really progressed much due to various reasons.

Not buying my lovely rented flat in London for 50K when I was offered first refusal as tenant and spending my £2k deposit on travelling around the world for a year instead. Doh!

Not going to apologise to my dad for getting caught drinking in the park, I was avoiding the inevitable telling off, not that he so much as raised his voice,I just know he was disappointed. He died that night, completely out of the blue, I was 14 and I’m 43 now and it still haunts me that he died disappointed in me :(

I regret not letting myself be happier. I'm still doing it.

Not rtft but these are really interesting. Seems people often regret not taking the 'other path'. So some regretting settling down too young, but others too late, not having children or having too many, going to uni or not, travelling/ spending or working/ saving. It's easier to think life would be better if we'd done something different, but we can never really know.

I like the lyric "our circumstances are half chance, so don't congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself too much either".

Not buying the flat I was considering in London in the early 90s. I would be able to sell it and buy a mansion in my small town today.

Ian Mc Ewan quote:
“ Blind luck, to arrive in the world with your properly formed parts in the right place, to be born to parents who were loving, not cruel, or to escape by biological or social accident, war or poverty, and therefore find it so much easier to be virtuous.”