In just under a month after the disputation Kierkegaard had boarded ship for Stralsund en route to Berlin. Already before the disputation, some weeks after the dissertation itself had been approved, Kierkegaard had returned Regine's ring. The engagement had lasted thirteen months. He said later that the day after he had proposed he knew it was a mistake. It wasn't that he didn't care for her, on the contrary he was totally captivated and once said it would have been impossible to live without her had he not been so sure that his own ‘melancholy and sadness’ were bound to get in the way. Not, however, just because it would be unrealistic to suppose that he could get rid of them. In fact, in his complicated state he saw them as a blessing in disguise.

Not just as an excuse to get away from Regine – the melancholy and sadness now seemed inextricably bound up with what was most ‘him’. Rather than leave himself behind, he was determined that something good should come of it, that is, of him. Besides, for Kierkegaard any sense of love in an erotic form making ‘infinite’ claims, in the way Friedrich Schlegel had suggested, seems to have been out of the question. For that he would actually have to fall in love, and whatever fondness or fascination entered into his side of the relationship, here as elsewhere and always before, Kierkegaard was too full of reflection and preoccupation for anything so spontaneous to occur.