POLL: What's Your Biggest Regret in Life (So Far)?

I should have gone with black lacquer to display my priceless Madame Alexander collection.

Most of the above. Getting old sucks.

Eldergay here with few regrets but a few observations. I'm in great shape for my age but my regret is that I didn't start with a professional trainer in my 20's or 30's to learn proper technique rather than wasting hundreds of hours working out ineffectively. I'm in good shape financially but regret I didn't hire a certified financial planner in my 30's or 40's instead of reading Money Magazine and listening to Suze. Emotionally, I wish I understood two LTRs ago that not everyone is cut out for relationships. Recreationally, I was lucky enough to try just about everything pre-AIDS. Creatively, I was lucky enough to make a living in the Arts. Paternally, I learned from my own parents that not everyone is suitable for parenthood. Overall, did every aspect of my life turn out as I hoped? No but that's OK. No regrets.

Many, though I’m still under 35 and not terribly deprived or neglected or abused.

The ones that eat at me lately are the ones where I judged another person or coldly dismissed what they were going through at the time. I think I used to be very arrogant and self-centred as a teen/younger person, and often pushed people away inadvertently because I couldn’t or wouldn’t support them, or even just manage to acknowledge and give space for their experiences. By clinical definition I’m not a schizoid, but I used to behave just like one—in retrospect, I believe this was a self-protective mechanism I adopted in the wake of bullying, emotional neglect and minimisation I received from my family.

Worst of all, one of those I pushed away was a girl (I’m a lesbian) with whom I think I had a rare once-in-a-lifetime spark of near-perfect connection and understanding and synergy; someone with whom I think I could have been intimate and shared a future life. Perhaps this is fatalism, but I truly don’t believe I’ll ever meet someone like her and connect in the way that I did with her again.

Even with this knowledge, it a daily battle to override my default mechanism, and just hug people and hear them. I’m way better now, but still not up to scratch. Still, it pains to think that their are at least dozens and at most hundreds of people out there who hold an image of me as a nasty, icy, soulless asshole who sneered at very human moments and problems like she didn’t care. I did care, it just terrified me to confront that and process it. But that’s no excuse, and I know it..

I don’t really have regrets. Not because my life is perfect by any means. But I find it hard to conceptualize that I would feel very differently if something about my life was radically different, like having kids. I would love to have them, but so many other things in my life would have been difference and worse.

So my only real regret is, I wished I had gotten one more chance to hug someone I loved who died very suddenly.

Entering a certain young harlot in pageants...

Not my biggest. I am sure I will post that later on in the evening. After my friend graduated college he lived in Toledo Ohio and was so excited to find a bar/nightclub named after our two names, -and-'s That that's all he could talk about! So he drove to Iowa to get me so we could hang out there. The road trip out there was great and the destination was well worth it. A few hours there, drinks flowing nicely he said" come dance with me." Did he mean dance WITH him or be in the general vicinity of the dance floor as him? Yes, I was that fucking dumb! So I said, "oh you go without me." If I could do it again I would have channeled my inner Miley Cyrus.

I didn’t go to college and I was way too bright for all the working-class jobs I had.

I was really into fit 60-somethings in my 20s, but I was too embarrassed to actually date them because of the age difference. So I missed out on being named in the will. And for what?

Non, rien de rien. Non, je ne regrette rien.

I shouldn't have given away my Franklin Mint set of cats to Goodwill.

I'm turning 50 in April....I've lost 2 long term Partners to AIDS....A best friend to an OD......I am shocked that I'm still around....The stories I could tell of my youth....And I'm going on 18 years with the same man

My biggest regret is the people I've hurt. I've done so many bad things and I hate myself each day for it.

Not DOING some of the things I have indistinct dreams of, but the opportunity is closing. For example, I would love to have lived around New Orleans at some point but how do you actually cram that in if your whole life is elsewhere. Ditto on studying abroad, and some career aspirations.

Right now, my biggest regret is that I made dinner for some asshole who decided to pick up something on the way home instead because he is pissed off at me. And this after I picked up his prescriptions!

My regret is that I didn’t pour his medicine down the toilet and flush.