Trying to Decide Something

[Clueless Morgan]

I've always attempted to live in a "no regrets" way, but I realize I have every regret right now.

I have mixed feelings about a "no regrets" philosophy about life. On the one hand it can lead to a lot of fun and interesting experiences you might not otherwise have had in life. On the other hand, it can blind you to your own motivations and give you an excuse to do things that could become harmful or damaging to yourself of someone else.

I don't know that there's a solution to this, other than to strive to live a "no regrets" life, but to remember that when your "no regrets" decisions significantly involve another person that a self-examination should be done to assess your own (and their) motives as a way of protecting both parties.

For myself, I know that I've used the "I don't want to have regrets about passing this opportunity up" as a means of forging ahead into a relationship without examining my own motives for pursuing it. In the end I did walked away with regrets, they were just a different set of regrets than I imagined I would have going in.

Having said this, this kind of comes back to Dys's allusion to examining your motives. Just as you should think about your own motives for wanting to reconnect, I think you should also spend some time examining just where your regrets are coming from. Do you regret how things ended between you? Or the fact that you engaged in the relationship in the first place? Do you regret how you treated each other? Is your desire to reconnect somehow related to your feelings of regret?

Yeah... I'm sane enough to think that way. I keep trying to put time limits on myself- like: just wait a week before trying to contact him in another way; I'm just so ridiculously manic right now. I'm trying not to be nuts; I swear.

I'm doing this with a particularly aggravating penpal. She is terrible about writing me back, and when she does she espouses her desire to keep writing but then goes months without contacting me about anything. I'll fb message her and I get a "seen" time stamp, but she never writes back, not even "hi." So I mark my calendar with the days I've emailed her and then project 6 to 8 weeks into the future before I email her again to check in.

Yes, it's extremely annoying, but it also means that I only get really obsessive/mad about her lack of communication every month and a half or so. (It's been one month yesterday since the last time I emailed her which was 8 weeks after the last time I heard from her - and that was only because it was my birthday. Before that it had been months. No, I'm not obsessing about this at all :p)