Journal

Regrettable

The whole regrets thing is slightly weird. The common theory is that you regret the things you don't do more than the things you do, but I'm not sure about that. That would mean you would always regret not having an affair more than having an affair. It sounds more like justifying doing what you want.

So the question is do I have any regrets? My daughter is the best thing in the world, every decision I've made has lead to her birth so surely to regret any of it is like saying I wish I had done something different, but doing something different could have meant my daughter not being born. So if I had to do my life over I'd do everything exactly the same so in that respect I'd have to say I have no regrets. At least none from before my daughter was born.

But there are still times where I wonder what might have happened. Probably the one I wonder about most was when I was 17. There was a girl at college, we were good friends and I developed feelings for her. At one point a bunch of us went to a club and then all slept round at a friends house, me and her stayed up all night talking, during which time I admitted I had feelings for her. The thing is it was a bit complicated, both of us were still sleeping with our exes. Her ex was a douche and mine was going through a lot of problems as I've mentioned before.

I don't know how much later it was, could have been a few weeks, we went out again as a group. Me and her needed to get buses home so everyone else left and we walked to the bus stop. It was late and rather cold and it was quite a wait for our buses. For some reason I ended up behind her with my arms round her in a hug for quite a while I think it was in December so was pretty cold.

The longer I hugged her the more the urge to turn her round and kiss her built. And I think my courage was almost at the point where to overcome my fear of rejection when my bus turned up. So instead of kissing her I got on my bus, my bus then sat at the bus stop for about 5 minutes with me and her texting each other, while she was still in the bus stop waiting for her bus. So I often wonder what would have happened if I had kissed her, based on conversations we had afterwards I'm pretty sure she would have kissed me back.

I don't think we would be together, we didn't even stay friends that much longer, that happened in the first year of college, at the start of the year she was with her boyfriend, they then split up (but as I said continued having sex). He was a year below so it wasn't until our second year of college that he started. As I said he was a douche, he was also from a rather rough school and so don't think any of his school friends went to the same college, so he had no-one to spend time with, and our group of friends didn't like him. So she would end up spending any frees that overlapped with him with him and so slowly dropped out of the group, I also got bored of a lot of my friends and so dropped out of the group anyway. She ended up getting back together with her ex.

We went to different universities but every so often she would contact me to "catch up" and see how things were going. Pretty much it seemed that she would break up with her ex because he cheated on her, we would exchange a few text messages for a couple of weeks, then she would go back to her ex. I think that might have only actually happened 3 times including the time at college but it was enough to get the impression of a pattern. It was in one of those text message conversations that she said something along the lines of if timing had been different maybe me and her would have been together, which I took to mean if we both happened to be single (and available) at the same time then maybe we would have given it a go.

So I can't say I currently regret not kissing her, at times I did, but kissing her could have resulted in us staying together maybe having kids, maybe not, we might have stayed together through university then split up and if we had been together when I finished university who knows where I might have ended up working, I might not have gone a placement year. So I might never have met my wife and hence our daughter wouldn't have been born. Or maybe we would have had a short relationship and nothing else would have changed except my tally of sexual partners would be 4 instead of 3.

Since my daughter was born I can't think of any particular regrets, although I'm generally quite tired all the time now so may just not be remembering them, there are little things which have caused arguments with my wife and stuff but nothing major.