Regrets about violating sanctity were more numerous than regrets about subverting authority. These regrets were also emotionally intense—especially when they centered on one of the most fiercely contested issues of the last sixty years: abortion.
Americans share a rough consensus about abortion’s legality, but they are deeply split on its morality. According to Gallup, about three-quarters of people in the United States believe that abortion should be legal in at least certain circumstances. However, 47 percent believe it is “morally wrong,” while 44 percent believe it is “morally acceptable.”[9] That divide came out clearly in my research.
Regrets about abortions were not as pervasive as regrets about bullying and infidelity, but they were prevalent. A fifty-year-old woman in Arkansas said:
I had an abortion at age twenty. That is the biggest regret of my life. My second-biggest regret is that I had another one at age twenty-five.
These regrets were partly about harm, but they were bigger than that: a belief that the actions amounted to a degradation of the very sanctity of life.
For example, a sixty-year-old woman from Pennsylvania wrote:
I regret that I aborted a fetus that would have been my third child with my husband. We’ve been married for thirty-four years. I had a tough pregnancy with my second. My husband did not want me to go through the suffering of another pregnancy just less than a year after our second child was born. I believe his thoughts were [also] the financial burden of a third child. . . . I cried the whole way to the clinic and have grieved every day since. . . . The burden of ending a life, a life created with love, bears on me every moment of every day.
A fifty-eight-year-old woman in Puerto Rico regretted:
Having an abortion. Having to say I’m sorry when I meet him/her in Heaven.
More than a hundred years ago, the French sociologist émile Durkheim wrote that the defining feature of religious thought—and, I’d argue, many other belief systems—is “the division of the world into two domains, one containing all that is sacred and the other all that is profane.”[10] We don’t always agree on the boundaries between those domains. But when we forsake what we believe is sacred for what we believe is profane, regret is the consequence.
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Moral regrets are a peculiar category. They are the smallest in number, yet the greatest in variety. They are the most individually painful. But they may also be the most collectively uplifting. There is something heartening about grown women and men waking up at night despairing over incidents decades earlier in their lives in which they hurt others, acted unfairly, or compromised the values of their community. It suggests that stamped somewhere in our DNA and buried deep in our souls is the desire to be good.
All deep structure regrets reveal a need and yield a lesson. With moral regrets, the need is goodness. The lesson, which we’ve heard in religious texts, philosophy tracts, and parental admonitions, is this: when in doubt, do the right thing.
喂养一只兔子，因为溺宠，放出铁笼子后，吃多兔粮包装袋的塑料而去世.[*]
Female, 38, China
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“Inaction. Not asking the girl out, not starting the business sooner, not applying to speak at the conference. I regret inaction more than any mistake I’ve ever made.”
Male, 43, Canada
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“Not taking my grandmother candy on her deathbed. She specifically requested it.”
Male, 35, Arkansas
10.
Connection Regrets
To understand connection regrets, let me tell you the story of four women, two friendships, and a pair of doors.
The first woman is Cheryl Johnson, a native of Des Moines, Iowa, a resident of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the former research director at a publishing company. Cheryl is in her early fifties. She’s devoted to her husband, her gym, and her latest projects, a house she’s building and a book she’s writing.
In the late 1980s, Cheryl attended Drake University, also in Des Moines, where she became fast friends with the second woman in this tale. Her name is Jen.
Cheryl and Jen belonged to the same sorority and lived in a house with about forty other women.[1] Among the group, these two stood out for their seriousness and ambition. Cheryl became president of the sorority; Jen was elected president of the entire student body. “We took our college careers a little more seriously than the typical student, and that made us oddballs,” Jen told me. “We connected in part because we felt on the fringes of things socially.”
They talked all the time. They supported each other’s enthusiasms and aspirations. They hatched big plans to take on the world.
Shortly after graduation in 1990, Jen married—Cheryl was a bridesmaid—and moved to Virginia. And shortly after that, Jen invited Cheryl to visit her at her new home. Jen said that she wanted Cheryl to meet a friend of Jen’s husband, who she thought might be a good romantic match.
Cheryl was taken aback. She’d been dating another Drake student for two years. “I thought he was the one.” Jen knew the guy, but Cheryl said, she “clearly did not think he was the one.” Cheryl politely declined the invitation to visit. No drama. No hard feelings.
Over the next few years, Cheryl and Jen, living in different parts of the country at a time before widespread email, exchanged letters and cards. Cheryl eventually ditched the boyfriend, whom she refers to today only as “Mr. Wrong,” and says, “Now that I’ve matured into the person I am, I can see what Jen saw.”
Within a couple of years, the letters dwindled. Then they stopped. Cheryl hasn’t talked to Jen for twenty-five years. They haven’t seen each other in person since Jen’s wedding.
“We didn’t have a falling out of any kind. I just let it kind of drift away,” Cheryl told me. “I regret not having that relationship in my life. I’ve missed having another person in my life who could share with me the kind of growth I’ve experienced over the years.”
The absence disquiets her. “If you’re going to die in a month, are there things you would want tied up?” Cheryl said. “I would like her to know that [the friendship] feels significant to me even twenty-five years later.”
During a conversation over Zoom one spring afternoon, I asked Cheryl if she’d consider trying to revive the friendship—or at least to call, email, or write Jen.
“I think the door’s open,” she replied. “If I were not a coward, I would reach out.”
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