Jemima Lewis: Regret should be a part of growing up

Acknowledging your mistakes is never easy, even when your confessor is a pollster in Delhi

The announcement of Gina Lollobrigida's impending nuptials - at almost 80, she is engaged to a 45-year-old estate agent - will give hope to Britain's frustrated pensioners. Lollobrigida has let it be known that their love was founded on unseemly quantities of hanky-panky. "It was as if we were struck by lightning," she recalls of their first meeting. "It was just passion - love came later."

By far the biggest regret of the over-65s, apparently, is that they haven't had enough sex. A survey published this week found that 70 per cent wish they had spent more time making love in their youth, with many expressing annoyance that they had been brought up to believe it was dirty and wrong.

Not all their regrets are of the carnal variety, however: 57 per cent wish they had travelled the world, 43 per cent say they should have pursued another career, 33 per cent would like to have stood up to their bullying boss, and - saddest of all - 21 per cent say they wish they had married someone else.

Acknowledging your mistakes is never easy, even when your confessor is a disinterested pollster on the line from Delhi. Saying something out loud has a way of making it seem uncomfortably real. It requires humility to admit to yourself, never mind others, that you have stuffed things up, and to accept that you may never be able to put them right.

Perhaps this is why regret has become such an unfashionable emotion. When the same pollsters asked 20-somethings what they most regretted, the most common response was "not getting on to the housing ladder sooner" - a sentiment so businesslike and impersonal that it hardly counts as a regret at all.

The post-baby-boomer generations can't really handle regret. It sits uneasily with the doctrine of self-love that has, since the Sixties, dominated Western culture. Brought up on a diet of platitudinous positive thinking - "Have faith in yourself!" "You can be whatever you want to be!" - we hardly know how to acknowledge our own failures of judgement and missed opportunities.

These days, in fact, the more obvious a person's mistake, the more tenaciously he or she will stand by it. Sometimes this means tying themselves into linguistic and philosophical knots. After the headbutt that arguably lost France the World Cup, Zinédine Zidane made this contorted apologia to his country: "I would like to apologise because a lot of children were watching the match. I do apologise but I don't regret my behaviour, because regretting it would mean he was right to say what he said."

I do apologise, but I don't regret it: this is the mantra of the modern sinner, a perfect inversion of the Christian injunction to repent sincerely. Often, as in Zidane's case, it seems driven in part by a fear of self-incrimination - as if regret were proof of guilt, rather than a laudable side effect. When Tracey Temple's affair with John Prescott hit the headlines, she admitted that she felt bad about his wife. "I loved Pauline Prescott. She is a fantastic person. I know she will be devastated. But I don't regret the affair." Why ever not? The damage was already done: would it not have been polite, at the very least, to concede that it should never have happened?

Sometimes, the problem is simple pig-headedness. Consider the experience of Joanne Thraves, who agreed, with her fiancé, to undergo radical plastic surgery for a television programme called Bride and Grooming. "My philosophy," she said, "is that you only regret the things you don't do." (Another platitude not to be trusted, by the way. I recall my mother saying something similar to me, en route to a children's sailing holiday in Emsworth - the most miserable two weeks of my life.)

In the spirit of adventure, Ms Thraves had a tummy tuck and liposuction. The scars became infected. On the big day, the bones of her "snow-queen-inspired wedding dress" dug into her stitches, causing "unbearable" pain. But she pressed on down the aisle, where she saw her groom for the first time since his surgery. "His nose job had changed his face completely and he also had a fake tan. When he smiled, his new teeth made him look like Mr Ed, the talking horse."

Still, Thraves had more pressing issues on her mind. Throughout the ceremony she was in "complete agony, comparable only to going through 48-hour childbirth". Afterwards, she had to be rushed to hospital to have her wounds drained. And her verdict at the end of this gothic horror? You guessed it: "Despite the complications and missing out on my honeymoon, I don't regret having the surgery."

Well, of course she doesn't. Having faith in yourself is, like all forms of religious mania, largely a matter of blind conviction. If we can be anything that we want to be, it stands to reason that we must have set out to be the way we are. In a godless age, we are our own deities, moving our lives in mysterious ways. Only a heretic would question the wisdom of the individual - a heretic, or a pensioner.

jemima.lewis@virgin.net1