Marry and You Will Regret It

The Quote

"Marry, and you will regret it; do not marry, and you will also regret it; whether you marry or do not marry, you will regret both. Laugh at the world's follies, and you will regret it; weep over them, and you will also regret it; whether you laugh at the world's follies or weep over them, you will regret both."

— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Diapsalmata

Original language: Danish

Historical Context

This passage comes from the Diapsalmata, the opening section of the first volume of Either/Or (1843), published under the editorial pseudonym Victor Eremita. The volume contains papers attributed to an anonymous aesthetic author — a figure whose life is governed by reflection, mood, and the restless avoidance of sustained commitment. The Diapsalmata are a collection of short, aphoristic entries that set the tone for the aesthetic existence.

Either/Or as a whole stages a contrast between the aesthetic and ethical outlooks. The second volume contains letters from Judge Wilhelm, who argues that the aesthetic life is unsustainable and that commitment — to marriage, to a vocation, to ethical responsibility — is the path through which a self becomes coherent. The first volume, from which this passage comes, presents the aesthetic life from within, in its own voice, without the ethical critique that the second volume supplies.

Meaning

The passage articulates a predicament: regret is inescapable. Whatever one chooses — to marry or not, to laugh or to weep — one will regret it. The structure is not a practical recommendation but a diagnosis of a condition. The aesthetic consciousness sees every choice as a loss, because every commitment forecloses the possibilities that were not chosen. To marry is to lose the freedom of solitude; not to marry is to lose the depth of shared life. The regret is not a consequence of choosing badly but of choosing at all, in a world where every "yes" is also a "no" to everything else.

The passage extends the pattern from marriage to emotional response — laughing or weeping at the world's follies. Neither stance is adequate, and both generate their own regret. The aesthetic author is trapped in a cycle of reflection that prevents him from inhabiting any response fully. He sees the limitations of every position before he can commit to one, and the seeing itself becomes a form of paralysis.

Philosophical Interpretation

The passage must be read within the structure of Either/Or as a whole. The aesthetic author's lament is not Kierkegaard's final word but the starting point of a sustained investigation into the relationship between choice, commitment, and selfhood. The second volume's Judge Wilhelm argues that the aesthetic predicament is real but not inescapable: it arises from the refusal to choose, and the refusal to choose is itself a kind of despair — what Kierkegaard elsewhere calls the "despair of not wanting to be oneself."

The philosophical significance of the passage lies in its exposure of the structure of existential choice. Choice, on this account, is not the selection of the better option from a set of alternatives. It is the act by which a person constitutes themselves as a self, taking responsibility for one path at the cost of others. The inescapability of regret is not a defect of choice but its condition: to choose is to foreclose, and to foreclose is to lose what was not chosen. The question is whether one confronts this loss through commitment — accepting the regret as the price of a coherent life — or whether one retreats into the aesthetic posture of seeing everything and committing to nothing.

Kierkegaard's later work The Sickness unto Death develops this analysis further, defining despair as the condition of a self that refuses to be itself. The aesthetic author of the Diapsalmata is, on this reading, a figure of despair — not in the colloquial sense of sadness, but in the philosophical sense of a self that cannot achieve coherence because it will not commit. The passage's rhetorical power comes from the honesty with which it presents this condition, before the ethical and religious responses that Kierkegaard develops elsewhere.

Related Concepts

• Meaning: The passage exposes the difficulty of finding meaning without commitment, showing that the aesthetic refusal to choose generates its own form of despair.
• Freedom: Freedom here appears not as the absence of constraint but as the burden of choosing — and the inescapable regret that choice entails.

Related Learning

• Explore the Either/Or archive entry for the full contrast between aesthetic and ethical existence.
• The Existentialism page situates Kierkegaard's analysis of choice within the wider tradition.

Sources

1. Søren Kierkegaard. Either/Or, Part I. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Diapsalmata.
2. "Søren Kierkegaard." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/
3. "Søren Kierkegaard." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/kierkegaard/