So many regrets...

How would you feel if your significant other had many regrets when it came to dating and romance?


My ex is my ex because he said "I regret" too many times. I started to feel that with all his regrets, he might be more prone to dipping into the past in order to "correct" something that he never moved on from (which he did). I became paranoid, and started believing that I didn't measure up to his regrets--I felt that he wasn't content with me, and never would be. It caused a massive amount of tension in our relationship, and of course, we're no longer together.

i can understand what you are saying. My ex had a child in high school and went right into the military in order to have money to support the child. However, his deployments kept him from the child, so they never really bonded. He used to tell me all the time that he regretted things, and he wished he could have done things differently. Eventually it came between us, because he would ask me what i thought of situations that arouse between him and the child/child's mother. His guilt kept him from seeing things clearly.

It's one thing to have regrets & wish you had done some things differently. But you have to reach a point in your life where you forgive yourself for the mistakes you've made & move forward. Clinging to guilt not only isn't healthy, it doesn't change anything. You have to forgive yourself & if other people don't, that's their problem.

I'm kinda' scratching my head here, and I guess I just can't see the problem. There has to be more to the behaviors mentioned than just regrets. I have a stack of life-long regrets as tall as I am, and I don't think my husband's miserable because of it. (Of course, he doesn't know the half of them; I can't fix any of them, I use my past as lessons for now and tomorrow.)

I think too many regrets make life much more difficult than it already is.

CeCe wrote:It's one thing to have regrets & wish you had done some things differently. But you have to reach a point in your life where you forgive yourself for the mistakes you've made & move forward. Clinging to guilt not only isn't healthy, it doesn't change anything. You have to forgive yourself & if other people don't, that's their problem.

I had an epiphany years ago in a situation that might cause guilt:
"Guilt is a pervasive emotion that slips around the edges of rational thot."

So, now all the ex's have added one more regret to their lives.

I regret nothing.

Bluesmama wrote:I'm kinda' scratching my head here, and I guess I just can't see the problem. There has to be more to the behaviors mentioned than just regrets. I have a stack of life-long regrets as tall as I am, and I don't think my husband's miserable because of it. (Of course, he doesn't know the half of them; I can't fix any of them, I use my past as lessons for now and tomorrow.)

Unless their regrets over things they did or didn't do in the past was causing them to act in a way that affected their relationship with me in the present I wouldn't be overly concerned. But if I had to listen to them constantly piss and moan about it, then yeah, it could be a problem. Maybe it's over something I could help fix now. If I ever found out that my wife had a deep regret that her life is incomplete because she didn't go to college I would help her realize that goal now.

Bluesmama wrote:I'm kinda' scratching my head here, and I guess I just can't see the problem. There has to be more to the behaviors mentioned than just regrets. I have a stack of life-long regrets as tall as I am, and I don't think my husband's miserable because of it. (Of course, he doesn't know the half of them; I can't fix any of them, I use my past as lessons for now and tomorrow.)

That's a key point; I probably should have mentioned that in the original post but I wanted to keep it a thread a not a rant lol. I knew WAAAY too much! And after a while, I stopped seeing him as emotionally stable. You're right that there was more questionable behavior than just simply voicing regrets. However, I think that the sheer weight of his regrets lead to a lot of the questionable behavior! That's where the original question stemmed from, because it has been my experience that having a regret means there's some unfinished business.

In a previous thread a while back I talked about how he and I recently got into an argument because he gave me a play-by-play of a text argument HE initiated with an ex-girlfriend from years ago, because he wanted her to know how much she "scarred" him. I'm sure he thought he was doing the right thing by being open and honest. But my thing about that was: 1)why would I care, 2)why would SHE care, and 3)why does HE still care? He mentioned frequently that he regretted many things about that relationship, and I felt that him contacting the ex was a way of trying to "fix" a situation that should have been left in the past. After that, the relationship went past the point of being repaired.

IMO, he had so many regrets about his past that he couldn't focus on our future. No matter how much he said he wanted us to be together, all the "I regret..." made his words hard to believe. Knowing that he acted on a "regret" sent me over the edge; I probably would have been better off not knowing.

Does he have 'regrets' in the context of having done some things, or made decisions, that were wrong (guilt). Or is it 'regrets' in that he's disappointed that things didn't work out? Sounds to me like he's hoarding a lot of anger and is definitely not over the ex.

He sounds a bit like my first husband when we were dating, even in the early stages of our marriage (and he was emotionally unstable as well). It wasn't the cause of the divorce (he got over the ex well by then). But he had you while he had the ex in his mind/heart, too. That's what was getting in the way, and I am glad that you decided to get out of this Charlotte's web.

Bluesmama wrote:Does he have 'regrets' in the context of having done some things, or made decisions, that were wrong (guilt). Or is it 'regrets' in that he's disappointed that things didn't work out? Sounds to me like he's hoarding a lot of anger and is definitely not over the ex.

He sounds a bit like my first husband when we were dating, even in the early stages of our marriage (and he was emotionally unstable as well). It wasn't the cause of the divorce (he got over the ex well by then). But he had you while he had the ex in his mind/heart, too. That's what was getting in the way, and I am glad that you decided to get out of this Charlotte's web.

I would have to say more of the former, because he told me a few times he made some bad decisions growing up that still bother him. I'm glad I got out of the Batcave too! He doesn't need a girlfriend; he needs a therapist and a Zoloft break.