What it’s Like to Regret Not Being in a Relationship For Your Whole Adult Life

I missed out on the one thing I realize now was most important.

Sometime around the year 1935, my grandparents met for the first time.

They lived across the street from each other as children, and then they began dating in high school. It was the beginning of a lifetime of love, only briefly interrupted.

Days after my grandfather’s seventeenth birthday he walked my grandma home from school on a cold February afternoon, entered his house, and was met by his categorically evil stepfather and a U.S. Navy recruitment officer.

Within the week he was voluntold to drop out of high school, then he said goodbye to my grandmother and told her he would always love her before he was shipped off to Illinois’s Great Lakes Naval Station for his training.

My grandmother, never as romantic, quickly married another one of her classmates and they produced my aunt and uncle before divorcing just as quickly.

To this day, I don’t know why my grandmother got that divorce.

I just know that if she hadn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this right now because I wouldn’t be here.

My grandparents had a love story for the ages.

There was my grandmother, a single, divorced woman with two children in the fifties, having friends watch my aunt and uncle when she went to work at the only job she ever held in her life, as a switchboard operator.

The next time my grandfather was home on leave from the Navy, he went right up to my grandmother’s door and knocked to ask for her.

When he found out what she’d been through in the years he’d been gone, he didn’t look at her as damaged goods. He didn’t look down on her for being divorced at a time when it was so taboo. He just wanted to save her and take care of her for the rest of his life.

They married within the year and my mom was born a year after that.

They would be celebrating their 69th wedding anniversary this month if my grandfather hadn’t died alone in a hospital room from Covid-19 in October 2020.

It was the most heartbreaking ending to the most beautiful real-life love story I’ve ever personally known and had the privilege of learning from.

The fact that they had just shy of 65 years of marriage together before death made them part will be something I envy for the rest of my life.

How lucky they were, I always think, to have known and loved each other for so long.

They played together as innocent children, they matured together through middle school and high school, they married and raised three children together, and then they welcomed five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

The beginning of their marriage weathered multiple long deployments when my grandma was left alone with three kids, one of whom was an off-the-wall little boy who never stopped causing trouble.

They moved from New Jersey to Illinois and back, then to Massachusetts, then to Connecticut, then to Florida, and back to Connecticut again.

They were a couple who loved fiercely and completely and constantly.

They went to bed together at the same time every night even if one or the other just lay there reading until they were tired enough to sleep, then they would rise together for coffee every day.

They enjoyed grocery shopping together as much as they enjoyed traveling the country.

He shaved his face every single morning — every. single. morning. of their marriage — because my grandma wouldn’t let him kiss her if he didn’t, and he never complained about her demand. He did it dutifully, a ritual daily reminder of how much he loved his wife.

Until the last day they were together, the day my grandfather went to the hospital and didn’t come back, the longest they ever went without speaking (besides the deployments) was five days after Hurricane Gloria because my grandma told him to move the car, a black VW Rabbit, away from the flag pole at the edge of the driveway.

“No, dearest,” he’d said to her. “I put that pole in myself, it won’t fall.”

It fell.

It utterly crushed the car and my grandmother was livid.

But on every day besides those days, they always said “I love you.”

They never went to bed angry with each other.

They never, ever considered leaving each other — they never even came close.

They went through everything together.

Everything.

They loved and lived together for over half a century, and they’ll be loving each other further into the future than we can possibly imagine.

They were so lucky.

I’m not sure whether my grandfather was ever with another woman besides my grandma, but I am sure he never had another love.

I wonder whether either of them ever felt regret for not being single longer, for not exploring more people and more relationships in their lifetimes.

I understand that it was much different for them because they came from a much different time.

The kind of casual “dating” I did in my twenties would have been severely frowned upon back in the 1950s, so maybe they didn’t consider it a “missed opportunity” as I may or may not have in their position.

Such as it is, once I learned from making the official count a few years ago, I’ve had twenty-five sexual partners — more than the average woman, but not so many that I mind telling.

The longest relationship that I’ve ever had is the one I am in now, and everyone knows how rocky and fickle it’s been.

After four years of uncertainty, I am tentatively starting to allow myself to consider that this might be my forever relationship, which is a good thing because it’s the only way I’ll have a chance at one that lasts more than just a quarter of a decade.

I would very much love to marry my boyfriend and share the next thirty or thirty-five years of our lives until he’s old as dirt, but I can’t deny that it won’t be easy because I’m a 41-year-old independent single mom, and I don’t know how to share my life with someone like this.

I spent my late teens and early twenties hooking up with numerous men and one woman, having more what you’d call situationships than relationships, and I’ve never felt the need or pressure to do things to keep another person happy (or happy with me) for an extended period of time.

I wasn’t jealous at twenty when I watched one of my best friends from childhood walk down a sandy aisle to her man at the edge of the water on the hottest day I’ve ever endured.

Hell. No.

I was happy to be able to ditch my heels and book it to a bar with air conditioning to “pre-game” for the reception.

I was happy to drunkenly scroll through names on my cell phone and decide which guy I’d call to take me home and spend the night with.

But times change, and people change, too.

The Meaghan who went to that wedding didn’t want anything to do with being locked into a marriage, or anything resembling something that might last forever.

She was happy to dance from man to man with her special lady friend on the side. She looks back on those years with a fondness and nostalgia so acute it sometimes hurts the heart.

But times change, and people change, too.

Now, I’m the one who wants to get married.

I want to be wed til dead, but I don’t know how to behave in this kind of serious, long-term, and now live-in relationship.

How do I share my life with someone?

How do we make decisions together and compromise with each other?

How do I learn to trust this man enough to give him my whole lifetime of love and not wish I hadn’t?

I don’t know yet.

Yet…

I’m hoping to figure it out, but I’m learning there’s a learning curve, and I’m scared that I won’t live up to whatever expectations he might not be telling me he has.

This man is coming out of a twenty-five year marriage and thirty(ish) year relationship with a woman he’s known since she was young enough to take him to her prom.

Is he going to compare me to her, down to every little detail?

Well, she would have done it this way.

She would have been okay with this.

I never had to worry about this with her.

So I fret over whether I can switch out the sheets and comforter without asking his permission.

Is that something wives do, ask permission for things?

How would I know?

Even when he asks me what I want for dinner and I tell him, I always follow up with: “But what do you want?” so I can’t be accused of controlling everything in his life and making all of the decisions.

I’m afraid I won’t be good enough, and also that I will be too much.

I’m afraid I won’t live up to whatever expectations he already has around having a wife and marriage, or that I won’t want to do whatever it takes to make him happy.

Is this because I’ve been single too long?

I’ve been agonizing over whether this dog can learn new tricks, over whether I’ll be able and willing to adapt my life to fit another person completely within it, not to mention getting my daughter on board with it, too.

I did enjoy my single, most often willing to mingle twenties.

There’s something to say for taking chances, for rolling the dice over and over again.

But I wouldn’t be honest with you if I didn’t mention the biggest thing that makes me so sad that I didn’t meet my boyfriend sooner.

I wish I’d had my kid with him.

I wish he’d had his kids with me.

Having a child together now is absolutely out of the question, simply because neither of us wants any part of raising another child, and I don’t very much like parenting to begin with, but…

It would have been nice to have raised kids with him.

It would have been nice to have done it with someone I liked in general, let alone with the man I’ve loved the most, but that ship has sailed and I regret not being able to have had the chance to take that ride with him.

Whatever part of us we leave behind won’t be in a bloodline but in a collection of stories that has bound us from the beginning.

We began with sharing words, and words will be our legacy.

Oh, but if we’d met when we were younger…

If we’d met when we were younger we could have married sooner.

We could have had kids and grandkids and great-grandkids together.

We could have been a family in the way I have always wanted to have a family but haven’t…yet had the chance.

Maybe it will happen someday, and maybe it won’t.

Maybe I’ll get to have a family of my own and be part of a big family like his, the kind of family I always wanted but missed out on having my whole life.

I will be grateful if it happens.

I will be so, so lucky, and will appreciate it so much.

But I think I’ll still always regret not having the chance at a 50 or 60 or even 70+ year marriage.

It won’t happen for me in this lifetime.

It won’t even come close.

Yes, there will always be that part of me, that wild and free Meaghan inside with the live fast, die young attitude that appreciates all those flings…

But now there’s the old and tired Meaghan, and all she wants is to be able to relax into a single, final, comfortable relationship and a life and future that resembles the one she’s been dreaming about.

So, I didn’t get a young love that will last a half century or more.

I think we all have something in our lives that we wish we could experience the other side of, if just for a little while to see if we’d like it.

I wish I could have known what that kind of love is like.

I wish I could have had fifty anniversaries.

Although I didn’t exactly choose this kind of life and the timeline that comes along with this relationship, it’s like some wise woman once said:

“I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.” — Cheryl Strayed

To the Meaghan who never married young, I salute you from this shore.

I don’t have to go down on any ship.

I might finally be on solid ground.

I was immediately inspired to write this after reading this particular story by Charlie Brown — don’t worry, her story isn’t nearly as long-winded as mine. Thank you, Charlie, for making me appreciate what I have even though I’m still sad about what I missed.