Mine is: Getting married, complete and total waste of time.
I really try not to live with regrets, however, try as I might I have too many to list. If I had to pick one it would be giving my youngest daughter to her father while I suffered a nervous breakdown. I feel she would be a totally different person if I would have brought her with me while I healed.
My biggest meta-regret was imagining that my expectations of life would never be substantively violated. Which is a nice way of saying that I felt entitled to certain outcomes. A lot of that was religiously-mediated: I was god's special snowflake and he wouldn't fail to protect me, enlighten me, and just generally bless me and give me a leg up on those "others" who didn't believe "correctly". This led to all the poor decisions and resulting hilarity that represents my ACTUAL ... well, not regrets, exactly, but certainly disappointments. I was always true to the light I had at any point in time, so regrets? Not really. But disappointments, in spades.
To me a true regret is knowing what you SHOULD do, and not doing it anyway. At some level I knew that life is just stuff happening, is simply natural consequences and various amounts of good and bad luck. And I pretended it was otherwise, because I WANTED it to be what it wasn't. I DO regret THAT.
I have no regrets. Everything in my past served to make me who I am right now. To regret anything in the past would be to regret a part of me. I love who I am, so how could I regret anything that helped make me this way?
Not traveling abroad more before I had kids.
I don't regret getting married to my ex. We had 3 wonderful kids even though we couldn't make it work out.
When my train came into the station, I was at the airport. I was shot at but missed. Shit at but hit. The light at the end of the tunnel was a train coming in the other direction. When you got to the fork in the road what went wrong. Ask Yogi on this one. When I took the fork in the road will I ever know what would have happened had I taken the other. That I always spoke my mind and never had to remember what I said to persons whom I should have. That I was as a fool for thinking that I could make a difference in a world of greedy and self imbued persons.
Only when you are a true believer in any personal endeavors along your path do you learn what is regret and how many others you have met and experienced your road and most importantly. That when you got knocked down how fast you got up and how much you learned.
I fell asleep on the 3rd lap of the 1600 meters at the district meet in 1981. I was in 5th place and I pulled it out to get 2nd and a trip to the Regional meet. I should have smoked that guy who won but he earned it and I didn't... (P.S. I came in dead last at Regionals so it didn't matter, anyway ha ha!)
They say marriage is an institution, but who wants to live in an institution?