Understanding regret and moving forward
After a separation or divorce, it’s natural to look back and wonder: Did I settle for the wrong person?
It’s one of the most common and painful questions people ask themselves once the practicalities have been handled and the dust begins to settle. When the home becomes quiet and the daily rhythm shifts, the mind often turns towards what came before. You might replay the early days of your relationship, noticing things you once ignored or now understand differently. You might question whether you ever truly chose your partner freely. Or simply did what felt safe, expected, or sensible.
Reflection can be an essential part of healing. It allows us to understand what happened, to take responsibility without collapsing into blame. But when it slides into rumination or self-punishment, reflection becomes a trap. The goal isn’t to rewrite the past; it’s to understand it compassionately enough that it no longer holds you hostage.
What does “settling” really mean?
Settling doesn’t always mean you chose someone you didn’t love. More often, it means that you chose a relationship that met some of your needs, companionship, stability, belonging, but not the deeper emotional connection or vitality you longed for.
People rarely “settle” consciously. They make choices that make sense in context: choosing the partner who seemed kind and reliable, or who offered the safety they’d never felt before. In that moment, those decisions are not foolish. They’re adaptive.
From a psychotherapeutic point of view, settling is less a single event and more a gradual process. It’s a quiet accumulation of small compromises: tolerating what hurts, minimising what feels off, silencing the inner voice that whispers this doesn’t quite fit. By the time people realise they’ve settled, the web of emotional, practical, and family ties has often become intricate.
To recognise that truth later in life can be painful, but it can also be liberating, the start of a more honest relationship with oneself.
Why we sometimes settle for the wrong person
Understanding why we settle helps to replace regret with insight. There are many paths that lead to this experience, and most are rooted not in weakness, but in human longing for love, safety and belonging.
- Fear of being alone
Loneliness is one of the hardest emotional states to bear. For those who experienced emotional neglect, rejection or instability growing up, solitude can feel unbearable. Choosing partnership, even one that doesn’t quite fit, can feel like self-protection, a way to avoid the ache of being alone.
- Social and cultural pressures
Society still subtly idealises marriage and long-term partnership. Friends and family often ask “When will you settle down?” long before they ask “Are you happy?” These expectations can steer people into relationships that make sense externally but feel hollow internally.
- Hope and potential
Many people don’t fall for who their partner is, but for who they could be. It’s deeply human to believe that love will soften rough edges, that time will create closeness. Hope can blind us to reality, keeping us loyal to potential long after it stops being fair to ourselves.
- Familiar patterns
We are drawn to what we know. If love in childhood felt conditional or inconsistent, that pattern can feel like home. We might unconsciously seek out partners who recreate the emotional climate we grew up in, hoping, this time, it will end differently.
- The good-enough illusion
Sometimes, we stay in relationships that are “fine.” There’s no dramatic abuse or betrayal, just a quiet sense of disconnection. It’s easy to confuse the absence of crisis with health. But chronic emotional flatness can be just as depleting as overt conflict.
The emotional logic of settling
Settling isn’t stupidity. It’s survival. At the time, you made the best emotional choice available to you.
From a psychodynamic perspective, our early attachment patterns shape our tolerance for uncertainty, conflict and distance. If you learned early in life that love required compromise, or that your needs were too much, you may have unconsciously repeated that script.
Seen this way, “settling” is often an attempt to manage anxiety. The mind seeks predictability, even at the cost of passion or authenticity. Understanding that logic helps turn regret into compassion. You were not misguided, you were human.
Why regret hits hardest after separation
Regret is a natural part of the grieving process. It’s the mind’s effort to make sense of loss. You might catch yourself thinking:
- Why didn’t I see it sooner?
- Why did I stay so long?
- Did I waste years of my life?
Underneath regret lies grief, not only for the relationship, but for the self you were within it.
Regret often emerges most powerfully after separation because that’s when defences fall. During the relationship, you may have minimised or rationalised pain to keep functioning. After it ends, the truth floods in, and clarity can sting.
Psychologically, regret can also be a way of maintaining connection. When you keep thinking about what you could have done differently, part of you is still trying to stay attached. Naming that dynamic gently can help loosen its hold.
Turning hindsight into understanding
It’s easy to be harsh on your past self, to label decisions as mistakes, to replay conversations, to think If only I’d known better. But insight only comes with time, and you couldn’t have known what you know now without living it.
In therapy, one of the most powerful shifts comes when people begin to ask:
- What was I trying to protect or preserve by staying?
- What need did that relationship meet, even temporarily?
- What did it teach me about what I truly want and what I can’t compromise again?
This reframing doesn’t erase pain, but it transforms shame into wisdom. You begin to see that the person who settled was not naïve. They were surviving, learning, and doing their best with the emotional tools they had.
When “settling” was actually self-protection
Sometimes, what looks like settling was in fact an attempt to heal. You might have chosen someone steady after a chaotic upbringing, or someone calm after a volatile parent. Those relationships may not have been thrilling, but they served an emotional purpose: they helped you feel safer, more contained.
From a psychodynamic view, relationships are mirrors for our unfinished stories. We are often drawn to people who embody the unresolved — sometimes so we can repair it, sometimes so we can finally see it clearly.
When you recognise this, the question shifts from “Why did I settle?” to “What was I trying to resolve?”. And that’s where growth begins.
The danger of staying stuck in regret
If regret goes unexamined, it can harden into cynicism or self-reproach. You may start to believe you can’t trust yourself, or that love will always end in disappointment. These beliefs are understandable, but they close off possibility.
Regret is only useful when it’s in motion, when it leads to greater awareness rather than paralysis. The aim isn’t to “get over” the past, but to integrate it: to make peace with the version of yourself who made those choices, and to recognise that they brought you to the insight you have now.
Steps towards peace
Here are some ways to transform regret into renewal:
- Name the grief.
You’re not just mourning your ex-partner, but also the dreams and identity that came with the relationship. Giving this grief space to exist is a vital act of healing. - Revisit your narrative.
Language shapes memory. Instead of “I wasted years,” try “I was learning what doesn’t work for me.” That shift alone opens compassion. - Reclaim your agency.
You have the power to live differently now. Every time you make a choice that honours your truth, you rewrite the story that began back then. - Invest in understanding yourself.
Therapy, journalling or reflective conversation can uncover what drove your past choices. Awareness turns repetition into choice. - Allow hope.
It’s tempting to swear off intimacy after regret. But staying open, cautiously, thoughtfully, is a sign of recovery. The ability to hope again is evidence of healing.
From regret to self-forgiveness
Self-forgiveness isn’t about erasing mistakes; it’s about recognising humanity. We all settle at times. Not because we’re flawed, but because we’re human beings navigating fear, hope and need.
Forgiveness means accepting that your choices made sense then, even if they wouldn’t now. It means holding your past self with tenderness rather than contempt. When you do that, regret softens into gratitude. Not for the pain, but for the growth that followed.
A therapeutic view: rewriting the inner story
In therapy, people often discover that regret points to unfinished emotional business. The feelings stirred by a former partner can belong as much to the past – to early attachment wounds or unmet childhood needs – as to the adult relationship itself.
By exploring this, we begin to rewrite the inner story. Instead of unconsciously repeating old patterns – choosing unavailable partners, minimising needs, over-functioning -we start making conscious, self-aligned choices.
That’s the quiet miracle of post-separation work: turning what felt like failure into freedom.
Final reflections
If you’re looking back and wondering whether you settled for the wrong person, remember: clarity doesn’t have to become cruelty. Hindsight is sharp, but compassion softens its edges.
You made the best choices you could with the knowledge, maturity, and emotional safety available at the time. Now, with greater awareness, you have the opportunity to live differently, to build relationships grounded in mutual respect, authenticity, and emotional safety.
Regret loses its grip when it’s replaced with understanding. The past is not wasted; it’s woven into the strength that carries you forward.
