The Generative Power of Romantic Regret

Regret over past mistakes, particularly in love, is universal. It's what you do with it that matters.

Last Sunday, I was interviewed for a segment about romantic regret on CBS Sunday Morning. The story included interviews with Daniel Pink, author of The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, and Jackson Arn, art critic for The New Yorker, both of whom were asked to speak about the topic from their own professional vantage points: social science and art respectively. As for me, because of my work as a memoirist and, I presume, my nearly lifelong inability, until recently, to stick the landing on love, I was asked specifically to speak about my own history with romantic regret.

Let’s just say they came to the right place! I mean, where to even begin? Here? Here? Here? Here? My love life has been filled with mistakes, missteps, bad luck, and regrets. But, thankfully, my brain is not filled with it, and this, to me, is key. Why? Well, watch the video below, but in a nutshell, after years of therapy and inner work as my marriage crumbled then finally ended, I have learned not to dwell in regret. I obviously feel it in the immediate wake of romantic rupture, but then I mourn the loss and move on, using that feeling of discomfort, pain, and heartbreak as fuel for positive change, for my writing, for helping others not to make the same mistakes, and for (hopefully) not making those same mistakes again myself.

How did CBS come to interview me for this story? Well, Amiel Weisfogel, the producer, had read one of my Modern Love columns¹, in which I told three interwoven stories of missed connections: 1) the young man I discuss in the story, who stood me up in Paris (or so I thought); 2) the CEO of Hinge, Justin McLeod, and Kate, his one who got away; and 3) a man I’d met on Hinge during my first foray into app dating, which is why I’d reached out to Justin in the first place.

That column then became episode 2 of the first season of the Modern Love TV show on Amazon, with Dev Patel playing Justin and Catherine Keener playing yours truly. Here’s a little snippet:

One area that Weisfogel brushed upon in his story—one that I would like to expand upon here—is the generative power of romantic regret, not just to spur art and literature, but also to spur others to action and, I would even argue, to spur actual humans to come into being.

Case in point: as a thought experiment, I’d like to use the regret from that one missed connection back in Paris in 1989 to demonstrate how it has been put to generative good use over the past three and a half decades. So let’s hop on into our time machine, kids, and head back to April in Paris, 1989, where I was fruitlessly waiting in my apartment for the young man to arrive in that era before cell phones and the internet.

Me in my apartment in Paris, 1989, at 53, rue St. Denis ©Eric Brissaud

That apartment, by the way, was the size of the futon I’m sitting on. I had to roll it up every morning just to have room to “walk” around, although that’s giving the word walk too much credit. It was more like scooching. Anyway, less than a month after being stood up in that tiny abode, I met the man who would become my husband. Did we move in together soon thereafter because part of me was worried about being stood up again?