The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward(29)

One day, Kim scooted over in her seat to make room for the bullied girl. The two chatted amiably the rest of the ride. But because of that kindness, Kim herself was bullied at school that day. So, the following day, when the girl boarded, Kim refused to let the girl sit with her.

“I lost my integrity and it haunts me in the middle of the night and still makes me cry,” said Kim, who is fifty and now lives in Kansas City. The other girl soon stopped riding the bus. “My regret is that I didn’t befriend her. I didn’t stand up for her. I did the wrong thing and never had a chance to make it better.”

Regrets in this subcategory weren’t limited to childhood malice. People described insulting work colleagues, “ghosting” romantic interests, and threatening neighbors. Most hurts were delivered with words, though a few were with fists. And for all the American associations of behavior like bullying, these regrets were international.

A fifty-three-year-old man from the United Kingdom:

    I physically hurt a man when I was eighteen years old. I have spent the next thirty-five years hiding from life in every way. I am a coward.



A fifty-seven-year-old man from South Africa:

    I regret telling a woman I was dumping her because she was fat. Thirty years later I’m waking up at night in disbelief at the hurt I caused then.



Hurting others is so unequivocally wrong that many people seek to channel the regret into more respectable future behavior. “You look back on your previous self and you’re just embarrassed,” Steve told me. But “as an adult, I’ve tried to be a better person.” After graduating from high school, he earned degrees in psychology, nursing, and criminal justice. He’s worked as a pediatric nurse and as a counselor to delinquent children. “I’ve done badly by people in the past and I want to do right by people in my current state,” he told me. “There’s a certain part of me that takes a lot of pride in trying to make people feel safe these days.”





2. Cheating


Kaylyn and Joel, whose stories opened this chapter, weren’t the only unfaithful spouses the World Regret Survey turned up. Regrets about hurting others, especially through bullying, were the most pervasive. But regrets about cheating, especially in marriages, finished a close second. On this, too, most people in most cultures agree: we should tell the truth, keep our promises, and play by the agreed-upon rules.

In a few instances, people confessed to cheating others out of physical items—from a sixteen-year-old in California who regretted “stealing cash from a box” to a fifty-one-year-old in Romania who wrote, “I am ashamed that I stole a harmonica from one of my army comrades.”

Regrets about academic dishonesty, though not widespread, also spanned a range of ages—from a twenty-two-year-old woman in Virginia who wrote, “I regret cheating in school,” to a sixty-eight-year-old man in New Jersey who wrote, “I regret having helped someone cheat on a calculus test . . . my freshman year. I have not figured out how to make that right.”

But marital infidelity topped the list—with these regrets coming in from six continents and dozens of countries.

A fifty-year-old woman:

    I had an affair—worst mistake of my life. Now I always have to live with how awful I was to my husband. Instead of just being real and telling him how unhappy I was, I decided to do something so incredibly stupid that I’m not sure I can ever forgive myself.



And a fifty-year-old man:

    I regret the fact that I lost faith and strength in myself and cheated on my wife. I feel the regret every day.



A fifty-five-year-old woman:

    I cheated on my husband. He was an incredibly lovely man who loved his family. I am not even certain why I did this. I loved him. I was a young mom of four children. We were a close family—we had fun, spent time together, really had no worries, and yet I still did that.



Harm and cheating overlap. Infidelity hurts the betrayed spouse. But what respondents seemed to regret the most, beyond the pain they inflicted, is the trust they shattered. “We took vows. I did betray him,” Kaylyn told me. “I made vows to my wife that I destroyed,” Joel said. “My integrity was out the window.”

Jocelyn Upshaw, who works at the University of Texas (and who asked that I use a pseudonym instead of her real name), had a nine-month affair with a coworker at a moment when her marriage felt lifeless. She eventually told her husband. They went to therapy. The marriage survived. But the breach still nags at her.

“My husband and I made this commitment to each other. And I didn’t keep my end of the bargain. My husband put his trust in me and I let him down,” she told me. “Lying and cheating are pretty high on the ‘don’t do that’ list if you’re going to be a good person.”

In the wake of their actions, Kaylyn, Joel, and Jocelyn worked to make things, if not right, at least better. Kaylyn confessed to her husband the morning after her indiscretion. “I’ve never been able to steal anything in my life. I’ve never cheated on a test. So, when this happened, I couldn’t keep it in,” she told me. Her husband stayed calm, and together they rebuilt trust. “He’s the best man in the world,” Kaylyn says.

Joel’s passage was rockier. He subsequently fathered a child with the other woman. But he says he could never shake “the weight of accountability to a God who says, ‘Do not commit adultery.’?” He and his wife reconciled. They moved and began working at a church elsewhere in Canada. “To know that I betrayed my wife is one of the worst things to have to say,” he told me. “My understanding of trust and trustworthiness has deepened, because I’ve experienced what it is to be untrustworthy.”