I think my thoughts are similar. I started mentioning some regrets to my JW wife- not including joining the cult, but actually going way back to dropping out of high school and never going to college. She threw in the "But then we never would have met" comment.
Yeah, that's true. I dearly love my wife. But still, we can regret the path we didn't take, which would have to include different people and different loves.
I tell you something that helped me. When I quit high school, I joined the Navy and saw the world. I left the Navy after some personal disasters and then I joined the JW cult. Awhile back, a Navy buddy who lives within an hour of me looked me up. Because I joined the cult, I kept no contact with the people I met. I thought that my Navy buddy was living the life meant for me. He was married to the same woman for 25 years, had a big house and one kid in college, another kid finishing high school. He was retiring young from the career I got a late start in, and had a military pension from spending a long time in the Navy then finishing in the reserves.
It sounded like the exact path I wish I had been on.
But within the last year of reconnecting with my old Navy buddy, he and his wife have gotten divorced because she was used to him being gone at work all the time and she couldn't stand actually being WITH him all the time. The kids are fine, but they tend to take their mother's side of everything because she raised them while he was gone at work. He needs to sell the house and find an apartment.
My whole point is that all that turmoil in a completely different path probably would have come with a completely different life. Sure, this path has it's turmoil and we can have regrets about where life should have gone. But here we are. We have to learn to be content with our regrets and our current life. Just slightly change a familiar motto: "If you can't be in the life you'd love, love the life you're in."