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.”
Jocelyn, who is not religious, says her regret has made her more empathetic. “Before this happened, I had this sort of righteousness about me. I was the good kid. I would never do wrong. And then I did really wrong. That opened my eyes that people make mistakes.” When she was younger, she says, she divided the world into good people and bad people. “It’s taken me a long time to realize that’s not true.”
3. Disloyalty
When Charlie McCullough graduated from the University of Maryland in 1981 with a degree in mechanical engineering, he considered enlisting in the armed forces. He admired the dedication the military required and the camaraderie it fostered. But more lucrative job offers beckoned—and he chose the private sector. “Those who serve, especially in the military, really do love our country,” he told me. “I regret I wasn’t part of that.”
Loyalty to a group is a core moral value. It’s expressed with greater gusto in some political and national cultures than in others. And perhaps because of that, regrets about this moral foundation were not as numerous as those about harm and cheating.
What’s more, the regrets people expressed were less about renouncing the group than falling short of one’s obligations to it. For instance, among respondents in the United States, which ended active conscription in 1973 and does not require national service from its citizens, a large number of people offered reflections similar to Charlie’s.
A forty-four-year-old woman in Michigan reported that her greatest regret was:
Not joining the military and going into the air force.
A fifty-eight-year-old New Hampshire man regretted:
I did not serve my country by joining the military prior to college or after college. Am the only member of my family not to join, and looking back, wish I had served.
A fifty-three-year-old woman in Wisconsin:
I regret not joining a branch of the military. . . . Service to the country, no matter where or what the role, be it in AmeriCorps, Peace Corps, etc., is tremendously valuable.
As Haidt writes in The Righteous Mind, the moral foundation of loyalty helps groups cement bonds and form coalitions. It shows “who is a team player and who is a traitor, particularly when your team is fighting with other teams.”?[8]
To my mild disappointment, the surveys unearthed not a single modern-day Benedict Arnold or Judas Iscariot. Charlie, in fact, ended up working for a large defense contractor that equips the armed forces. Yet merely being adjacent to the military was insufficient. He regrets not having “the experience of hardship and sacrifice,” of depending on others for survival and of their relying on him. “If you’re serving someone, it means you’re not serving yourself,” he told me. “The act of sacrifice is good for the other, but it’s also good for the soul.”
4. Subversion
The fewest moral regrets involved the Authority/Subversion foundation. A handful of people regretted “dishonoring my parents” and “being disrespectful to my teachers”—like the twenty-four-year-old man from India, who relayed this tale:
My father and I run a shop. A teacher who taught me at school comes for shopping. My teacher knows me and my father, but my father doesn’t know him. We give a little discount to whoever who has a long relationship with us and my teacher is among them. I thought my father knew him, so I didn’t tell him that he was my teacher. Sir paid full amount, not that he minded. But after he left, my father demanded that I should have told him that he was sir. It was such a shame and disrespectful for us that we didn’t discount the price to show some respect and gratitude. I deeply, deeply regret that incident every time that memory is recalled.
Such entries, though, were relatively rare. One reason for the dearth of this type of moral regret is that the quantitative portion of my survey sampled only Americans and the qualitative portion included more respondents from the United States than from any other country. Had I taken larger samplings in nations and regions where the cultural values of deference are often more prominent, this type of regret might have been more common.
5. Desecration