“Marry, and you will regret it; don't marry, you will also regret it.”Søren Kierkegaard · Jurnale · 1850 · 1836
Every choice closes doors, and regret is the natural price of living only one life.
Kierkegaard touches the very structure of choice: to choose is to close doors, and consciousness cannot help seeing the closed ones. This is not an invitation to paralysis but a statement about the human condition — we live one life and endlessly imagine the other. The married lose their freedom; the unmarried lose intimacy. The classic case is the fifty-year-old wondering about the children he might have had, a question no one can ever answer.
If regret is unavoidable, then regret is no longer a signal that you chose wrong. It is merely proof that you chose something serious. Many people test their decisions by the feeling of longing: if I miss the lost options, maybe I made a mistake. But Kierkegaard shows that longing appears anyway, with any choice. Think of someone quitting a secure job: they will miss the safety, no matter how good the new path is. That says nothing about the quality of the decision. So the useful question is no longer «do I regret something?», but «is my regret the natural kind, or does it hide a real problem?». The next step: how to tell the difference between the two.
Why it matters It frees you from expecting a costless choice and lets you mourn the road not taken without undoing the one you took.