I find this comic sums up that feeling quite well: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/33

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.”

­­­­– Søren Kierkegaard

Whenever this is posted to HN commenters usually ask how you can regret something after having hanged yourself. Or maybe it's in the split second before the rope snaps and you lose consciousness?

He was a Christian and I think he could believe in death and regret.

Some of us believe that there is life beyond the grave.

I have a feeling that an easily overlooked moral of the story is that the brothers kept going because of the loving memory of what the other brother is doing

Well said!

Moral - do ALL the things!

I’ve thought about that. I married the objectively wrong person in my late twenties. Got divorced four years later. But, I definitely wouldn’t be as good of a husband or (step)father now if I hadn’t made that mistake the first time. I wouldn’t have appreciated my current marriage as much.

As someone currently in their late twenties, what compelled you to get married and what ultimately was the breakdown if you don't mind me asking?

I don't know what made me get married honestly. Maybe I was more in love with the idea of marriage than marriage itself and that I was tired of the dating scene. I got married relatively quickly after I met her.

The divorce was caused by her having a drinking problem. Most of the time we were dating she was living out of town and I was to naive to know what a drinking problem looked like. If you have ever dealt with someone with a drinking problem, it's the constant terror of not knowing what you were going to get when you got home.

But more generically, she was so consumed with friends, her family, and her own addictions to put us first. I was definitely not perfect, but it didn't matter what I did if there is only one person who is mentally all there.

I resonate a lot with what you went through because I find myself thinking a lot of the same thoughts. I think it's fair to assume most people grow up wanting a family of their own but there's this constant pull between waiting to find the right person while simultaneously feeling like life is passing you by and wanting to move on to the next phase.

You're spot on when you say that a drinking problem with someone you love is very difficult to spot. It's so easily masked with cheerfulness and parties. Thank's for sharing some info, it'll help me in the future!

Definitely, my parents had been married 35 years at the time (now 50 years) and they were high school sweethearts. So yeah, I guess I felt behind.

Same here, my wife drinks drinks a lot probably.

I miss spending time with her but she it seems wants her bottle more.

Not the OP, but was in an essentially identical situation. I married my high school sweetheart. I met her when I was a HS junior. We had a long-distance relationship for four years, lived together for another three, then married, so we didn't rush into it. I was head over heels in love with her. We had a lot in common, and a lot of good times.

It broke down because we just grew apart. I decided I was tired of being a geek so I stopped doing geeky things and started acting more like a normal person. She didn't. The breakup was amicable. We had both met other people whom we both married after the breakup and are both still married to (at least AFAIK -- I'm not in contact with her any more). Despite the fact that we probably had the easiest divorce in history, it was still one of the most stressful experiences of my life. I don't recommend it.

My second wife and I just celebrated our 23rd anniversary. She is completely different from me, not at all the sort of person I would ever have imagined myself being with. And yet, somehow it has worked out this time.

FWIW.

your experience gets at what i think may be essentially confounding in giving advice to our younger selves.

you are not the same person, through time. you will live many lives and become many different people.

I think there is a big difference between being allowed to send a one sentence "oracle" statement like that vs having a half hour conversation with your younger self around why you shouldn't marry her, how it turned out to be the wrong decision, and what you should focus on instead.

The other study mentioned shows regrets follow opportunity. So yes it's very likely... as we don't know the results of taking the other road and never will. So maybe the lesson is whatever you choose be content with that choice... in that at least you had a choice where none might have existed. But that's not the human condition.

Another aspect of this is to consider all the moments when it could have gone very wrong. Somehow, we only consider the missed opportunities and not the lucky saves. Speaking of taking roads, you can become a traffic statistic any time you cross the street but it doesn't appear in our tree of past possibilities.

This is essentially why I’d never take that theoretical opportunity. I’ve had plenty of hard times in life that could have been avoided if I knew what the future held. But I think I always come out the other end (eventually) better off in one way or another. Which I credit to the principles that I try to live my life by. If I was instead making decisions based on some infallible vision of the future, who knows how things would have turned out. There’s plenty of things in my life right now that I value a lot, and when I ask myself ‘would I trade those things to avoid hardship I experienced in the past’, the answer is always no.

It doesn't have to actually be MORE regrets, it is just as powerful with the observations of merely different possible ones.

While reading the article I was wondering what circumstances people were in when they made those choices.

For example, was it the late-20s to mid-30s man that was otherwise worried about companionship who then seemingly felt lucky or blessed to find a good match without compromise? Before the likelyhood of age-congruent marriages became a thing of the past?

Would just knowing to avoid that person actually prevent them from making the exact same mistake? Swiping on dating apps and enduring meetups with the forced pretext of dating?

Would the distraction of discontent in their relationship really be less fulfilling for them than the distraction of a wish for companionship, or the drive to merely check the box on rites of passage?

Is there a way to know?

This is a great thought experiment. We don't observe the counterfactual.

I've noticed this with people and their early career decisions as well. "If I could do it over again, I would have majored in something else," or "I should have taken that job." They often don't really know if it would have improved their circumstances.

Hearing enough folks talk like this made me realize that most people will have some regrets, no matter how smart their choices were. It's part of life.

The grass is always greener on the other side, but a bird in hand is better than 2 in the bush.

A stitch in time saves the space-time fabric of the Universe from falling apart.

Yes, but one path is a known bad (marry her) and the other is a possible good/bad. Weighing the amount of bad that the marriage is vs the likelihood of it being worse is key.