Why Most Relationships Fail (And How to Choose Better)

Summary

Biohack-it Podcast: Why Most Relationships Fail (And How to Choose Better)

Host: Iman Hasan
Guest: Mark Groves (Relationship expert and founder of “Create the Love”)
Date: December 18, 2025

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Overview

In this powerful, heartfelt episode, Iman Hasan welcomes Mark Groves, renowned relationship coach and creator of "Create the Love", for an unfiltered discussion on why most relationships fail, how to choose better partners, and the importance of radical self-awareness. Together, they debunk myths around love, discuss societal pressures—particularly on women—and provide actionable insights for building healthy, aligned relationships. The episode offers a blend of personal storytelling, attachment theory, practical guidance, and compassionate wisdom for anyone navigating love, heartbreak, or self-discovery.

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Key Themes & Insights

1. Breakups as Catalysts for Transformation

• Mark explains how breakups provide unique opportunities to deconstruct past patterns and realign with one’s true self.

• Memorable Quote:

  “If you date unavailable people, you are unavailable. If you tolerate bullshit in relationships, you're part of the bullshit.”
  (Mark Groves, 00:00)

• Both Iman and Mark share personal stories of post-breakup liberation, addressing cultural shame—particularly towards women who leave relationships.

2. Challenging Societal Norms and Gender Expectations

• Iman highlights societal pressures on women to stay in unfulfilling relationships, noting the judgment faced when choosing independence ("Did you meet someone else?").
• Mark distinguishes between healthy compromise and self-abandonment in relationships.
• Quote:

  “Relationships require compromise, but they don’t require self-abandonment. Those are two different things.”
  (Mark Groves, 05:01)

3. Values Alignment and Conscious Partnership

• Clear alignment on values, life goals, and relationship agreements is crucial from the outset.
• Mark recalls how, early in his life, he failed to see feedback as growth but now views feedback from his wife as essential wisdom.
• Quote:

  "If you want to be in a really high functioning relationship, a healthy relationship, you have to have humility and you have to be able to eat humble pie. But humble pie does not taste very good."
  (Mark Groves, 06:40)

4. Green Flags & Red Flags: What to Look For

• Iman asks: Top 3 green flags and red flags when starting a new relationship.
  • Green Flags:
    • Ability to communicate and align on the pace and space of the relationship.
    • Kindness and generosity, especially towards people who can’t do anything for them.
    • No games, straightforward communication—energy feels easy and simple.
  • Red Flags:
    • Rapid escalation or “love bombing” (fairytale, Disney energy).
    • Poor response to boundaries or requests.
    • Attempts to isolate you from friends/family (classic narcissistic behavior).
• Quote:

  "As soon as you're thinking about power in a relationship, you're already participating in a thought that power is scarce."
  (Mark Groves, 09:25)

5. Scarcity vs. Abundance Mindset in Love

• Iman emphasizes approaching love and life with abundance: "There are 8 billion people in the world"
• Mark connects the scarcity mindset to self-protection and confirmation bias (“There’s no good people in LA”), highlighting how our beliefs shape our experiences.
• Quote:

  "If I believe there's no people, what I'm really saying is I don't trust people and I'm choosing unconsciously people... who validate my fears and validate my beliefs."
  (Mark Groves, 15:47)

6. The Trap of Over-Intellectualizing Self-Improvement

• Mark warns that endlessly consuming self-help without action creates another identity (“I’m always working on myself” becomes a crutch).
• Growth is about implementing knowledge and embracing opportunities rather than obsessing over what’s “broken”.

7. Kindness, Generosity, and the Danger of Taking Partners for Granted

• Mark distinguishes between being kind publicly versus with one’s closest people; lack of congruence signals deeper issues or unresolved conflicts.

• People often project their worst onto intimate partners, enabled by assumptions of permanence (marriage=“can’t leave”).

• Quote:

  "If you don't have access to no, you don't actually have access to yes."
  (Mark Groves, 21:28)

• Healthy relationships involve daily, mindful choosing of one another; feeling stuck leads to stagnation or bitterness.

8. The Gendered Nature of Divorce Initiation

• Women initiate 73% of divorces.
• By the time someone leaves, the decision often builds over two years of unmet needs and ignored signals.
• Mark urges men to cultivate greater emotional intelligence, noting that socialization has failed to prepare them for today’s relational demands.

9. Accountability and Not Trying to “Fix” Unavailable Partners

• When asked how to help men become emotionally available, Mark stresses avoiding codependency:
  • Set boundaries, call-forward growth explicitly (therapy, men’s groups, etc.)
  • Don’t try to "fix" someone else—step back, invite them forward with space, not pressure.
  • “If you date unavailable people, you are unavailable.” (Mark Groves, 29:44)

10. Attachment Styles: Understanding and Transcending Old Patterns

• Attachment styles (anxious, avoidant, secure, disorganized) stem from early experiences with caregivers.
• Mark reframes “I am [anxious/avoidant]” as a temporary reaction, not a permanent label.
  • Anxious: hypersensitive to distance/threat to connection
  • Avoidant: fears being engulfed; needs space to self-regulate
• The path to secure attachment involves:
  • Self-compassion
  • Learning to choose oneself rather than compulsively seeking external validation
• Quote:

  "If you're someone who always wanted to be chosen, then you have to ask yourself, how am I not choosing myself? Because once you do that, then you're not waiting for someone else to choose you."
  (Mark Groves, 38:18)

11. Breakups as Opportunity: The Power of Self-Reflection and Grief

• Mark: The pain of a breakup is a “potent vehicle for transformation.” True healing requires honest reflection, sobriety, and the courage to feel difficult emotions.
• External betrayal is almost always preceded by “internal betrayal” (not listening to your intuition or setting boundaries).
• Quote:

  "If you do it [breakup] sober, you will be. Yeah. And all the ways in which we anesthetize our grief, we don't realize that grief is one of the most potent vehicles for transformation."
  (Mark Groves, 45:15)

12. How to Move Forward and Attract the Right Relationship

• The best path after a breakup: come alive, pursue passions, and align deeply with your own values.

• “Get a revenge soul—not just a revenge body.” (Mark Groves, 49:49)

• To find aligned love, become the evidence that alignment is possible through how you live and relate.

• Quotes:

  "If we want to find a partner who is aligned with our values, we have to be aligned with our values."
  (Mark Groves, 50:25)

  "Live your life in the most full spectrum of color and live it to its utmost potential. Because I'm living for me and creating from that place of abundance, joy, fulfillment, love and beautiful relationships..."
  (Iman, 51:12)

  "What's meant for me will never miss me, and what misses me is never meant for me."
  (Mark Groves, 52:47)

  “What is meant for you will find you. Even if it's hiding between two mountains, if it's not meant for you, even if it’s between your lips, it will not be yours.”
  (Iman, 53:01, referencing an Islamic proverb)

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• Intro, Mark's Origin Story & Societal Judgement (00:00 - 04:56)
• Leaving Relationships and Liberation for Women (03:34 - 06:06)
• Compromise vs. Self-Abandonment (05:26)
• Green Flags vs. Red Flags (07:19 - 12:41)
• Scarcity Mindset vs. Abundance in Love (15:14 - 17:31)
• Personal growth vs. Overconsumption of Self-help (18:00 - 19:36)
• Kindness to Strangers vs. Partners (19:50 - 22:54)
• Daily Choice, Divorce Statistics, and Men’s Emotional Growth (23:39 - 27:09)
• Developing Emotional Availability—Avoiding Codependency (28:55 - 32:22)
• Attachment Styles, Self-Reflection, and Healing (32:22 - 41:33)
• Building Consciously Chosen Relationships (41:33 - 43:21)
• Breakups, Grief, and Accountability (44:47 - 49:49)
• How to Attract the Right Relationship—Living in Alignment (49:49 - 53:42)
• Cultural and Spiritual Wisdom on Destiny (53:01 - 53:39)
• Outro & Where to Find Mark (53:42 - 54:54)

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Memorable Moments & Quotes

• “If you tolerate bullshit in relationships, you’re part of the bullshit.” (Mark, 00:00)
• “Relationships require compromise, but they don’t require self-abandonment.” (Mark, 05:01)
• “By the time someone leaves [a relationship], it’s been about two years.” (Mark, 24:36)
• “If you date unavailable people, you are unavailable.” (Mark, 29:44)
• “If you don’t have access to no, you don’t actually have access to yes.” (Mark, 21:28)
• “If you want to find a partner aligned with our values, we have to be aligned with our values.” (Mark, 50:25)
• “What’s meant for me will never miss me, and what misses me is never meant for me.” (Mark, 52:47)

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Final Takeaways

• Breakups are not failures, but invitations to growth, alignment, and self-knowledge.
• True relationship health requires radical honesty, self-responsibility, and the courage to set and maintain boundaries.
• Your mindset—scarcity or abundance—shapes what you attract in love.
• Healing attachment wounds and becoming an “embodied” version of yourself draws the right partners and opportunities toward you.
• Live your fullest, most honest life, and the love you seek will find you when you are truly ready.

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Find Mark Groves:

• Create the Love
• MarkGroves.com
• Substack: Weekly letters & daily notes
• Mark Groves Podcast

Host: Iman Hasan, [Biohack-it Podcast]
Reclaim your health and life—on your terms.

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Transcript

[Mark Groves]

If you date unavailable people, you are unavailable. If you tolerate bullshit in relationships, you're part of the bullshit. If you're someone who always wanted to be chosen, then you have to ask yourself, how am I not choosing myself? We all have to be with the reality that our partner can leave us at any moment.

[Iman]

When people break up, you describe it like you're being torn apart to be.

[Mark Groves]

Put back together, whether you're left or leave. I think breakups offer such a unique window of opportunity. Why do some relationships last and people stay in love? And why do other people stay together and hate each other?

[Iman]

Mark Groves, welcome to biohackit. I was so excited to hear you were in Miami. I followed create the love for so long, and I was like, this man is a leading authority in relationships and love and all things we should become. And I was just excited to get you onto biohackit.

[Mark Groves]

Thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

[Iman]

I want to talk a little bit about your personal journey and what made you come to the place of create the love.

[Mark Groves]

Well, man, you know that saying that if you want to find what you love, find what breaks your heart? That was the original sort of birth story of why I created it. The irony is that I actually called it create the love you want, but it was too long of a name for Instagram, so by design, it became create the love. Yeah.

[Iman]

Which actually works better in a way. Right.

[Mark Groves]

So much better.

[Iman]

Create the love right in every aspect of your life.

[Mark Groves]

Yeah, it was. It was serendipitous. And I went through a breakup in my late 20s. I was engaged, and at the time, I was also in sales, and I loved communication. Sales, understanding human behavior. And when I went through that breakup, I thought to myself, like, why am I so good at talking about everything but my feelings? Like, that's not a. There's. There's not a skill set issue. There's something else going on. And. And so I started to study relationships. I wanted to understand, why do some relationships last and people stay in love? And why do other people stay together and hate each other? And what's the difference between those people? And why does society have such a hard time with relational endings? Like, we shame people who get divorced. We shame people who go through breakups. We've. We essentially teach people that if you're. If you're not in a relationship, you are operating from some form of deficit, and if you go through a breakup, you know you've let people down. Yeah. And so when I went through that Breakup. I felt a lot of judgment. You're afraid of commitment, things like that. And you know what I found interesting was that the judgment that I faced was like, I never felt more connected to myself, yet more judged. So it was a strange paradox to be holding that. For the first time in however many years, I felt really aligned. But I also felt really judged despite feeling aligned. And I started writing about what I was learning, and I started a blog. So it's like, obviously a long time ago when blogs were blog were cool. Now substack is cool. And I. I was dating a woman who ran social media for businesses. And she said, you should start an Instagram account. And I was like, nah, I'm not going to do that. And then we broke up. And I'm like, I'm definitely going to do that, you know? And I started Create the love in 2013 or 2014, one of them. And I guess, as they say, the rest is history.

[Iman]

So. I'm smiling so much hearing you say all that. So. I'm 42, I am going through a divorce, but I feel the most liberated and free that I've ever felt, and I feel the most aligned with myself.

[Mark Groves]

Beautiful. And.

[Iman]

And at 42, being a woman, people are like, you know, the dating pool is so hard and this and that. And I really am fond of my ex. I still treat him like family. He's always gonna be family to me, but he just wasn't in alignment with who I am and what I'm becoming and my value systems. And when I took that decision, I was so crystal clear. I was so comfortable in myself, but people around me felt more uncomfortable, and especially women, because they're like, well, did you meet somebody else? Is that why you're leaving? And I'm like, no, it has nothing to do with meeting anybody else. It just doesn't work in what I want in a partner. And I think society forces women, especially, to stay longer in relationships that do not serve them out of fear or gaslighting them, that, oh, maybe something better isn't out there and just settle because somebody's just a nice person. And I think that's where we sell ourselves short. And for me, hearing you speak and your page has been such an inspiration for me going through this process, you know, getting divorced, being separated, all that stuff, because it allowed me to find myself and my identity and stay true to who I am. And that's the piece that I think more creators need to do is help people get liberated into their own feelings.

[Mark Groves]

Well, yeah, you know, it's ironic to think, and I think it's a tough tension to hold that you're. That sometimes the loving thing to do is leave. Like that's actually the loving thing. And as you were saying, so many people, especially women, learn that they should compromise themselves, their goals, their dreams for relationship. Now look, of course relationships require compromise, but they don't require self abandonment. Those are two different things.

[Iman]

There was once I heard, it was a really famous clip by Mel Robbins that had gone viral and she says two things. You can love a good person, but if your value systems do not align and if the goals that you have for the life that you want to build and lead are not the same, you will over time become resentful 100%. And that is a piece of self abandonment. And I had to really think about those things and be like, the life that I want to build, the life that I want to lead, is this in alignment with the partner that I have? And if it's not, why force someone into a life that they don't want the best? And the kindest thing is to say you should be free to live the life that you want and I should be allowed to go out and create the life that I want.

[Mark Groves]

And you're, you know, your freedom is theirs. Like, that's the. Why do we not start relationships? Of course because we're not taught. But why do we not start with clear understanding of our values, clear understanding of the agreements? What are we going to do with this relationship? Why are we in a relationship? What are we going to create together? I mean, when I was young, I wasn't thinking, oh man, the feedback I'm getting from my girlfriend is valuable for my growth. I was not thinking, I was getting defensive. But now I see that the feedback that my wife gives me is, is a unique perspective. I can't see my own stuff. And it's actually wisdom. It's like she's offering me an opportunity to understand ways in which I need to grow and change. I don't always like the feedback, obviously, but I've learned that if you want to be in a really high functioning relationship, a healthy relationship, you have to have humility and you have to be able to eat humble pie. But humble pie does not taste very good. Growth is hard.

[Iman]

And it's, and it's, I feel like the biggest growth comes in relationships because the other person mirrors back to you the areas that are your shadows that you need to work on. And sometimes that's not comfortable, it's dirty.

[Mark Groves]

I don't like It. But it's liberating, right?

[Iman]

If somebody was listening to this and said, mark, I'm looking to get involved in a relationship, I'm starting to see somebody, what would be the three green flags they should look for in that partner? And what are the three red flags they should run far away from?

[Mark Groves]

Green flags. I love. I think we don't often think about green flags. We often focus on red flags. So a beautiful way to start, I think someone who really honors. So when two people come together, you're bringing two life paths together. And so two different people have different needs and understandings of the amount of space they need in relationship and the pace of the relationship. And so when you have these two lives moving in momentum and you're actually having to have conversations to align those two things. So when you go to bring that up, something like, hey, you know, I'm really starting to enjoy this. I'd like to get more clarity, create more clarity on what we are and what we're creating. Often we don't have that conversation because we're afraid to push them away. But yet it's the very conversation you need to have to figure out if there's alignment. You actually want to push away people who are not aligned. Right. And so that starts to align the pace and the space, and it starts to advocate for what you need. If they can have that conversation, that's a massive green flag. Also when they're checking in on you. You know, I think one of the coolest things, when I met my wife, I slid into her DMs on Instagram. And back then, you had to send a picture. And so I sent a picture of a sunset, and she had to respond with a picture. So she responded with a sunset. And. And we had been following each other for a while, but when I wrote her, I said, hey, you know, I just read a lot of your stuff. I really love the way you express yourself and what you have to say. And I'm just curious if you'd be interested in connecting beyond Instagram. And she wrote me back, like, I would love that. I always knew that we would connect beyond the gram. And I was like, dang intuition.

[Iman]

A woman's intuition.

[Mark Groves]

Yeah. And I was thinking, like, no games here. She's extremely confronted by it because I'm.

[Iman]

Like, how did that make you feel? Like, in your.

[Mark Groves]

Really excited. Yeah, I felt excited that there was. She wasn't trying to play any sort of space, like a game of catch and whatever. Chase and catch. And so what I loved about that and the green flag of that is I could feel the energy of how just simple it was. It was ease. And I think as we. As soon as. So from a red flag perspective, as soon as. As soon as you're starting to think about power in a relationship, power dynamics, and you're thinking about, I don't want to be whipped or I don't want to, you know, all the terms. Maybe that's a 90s terminal throwback, but it still applies. It still applies. It's like, we don't want to, oh, I don't want to text them back because I don't want to give them the power. As soon as you're thinking about that, you're already participating in a thought, that power is scarce. That there's either more or less as. Where I see it is that the more powerful my wife becomes, the more powerful we become and the more powerful I become. So it's not a finite thing. The third green flag, kindness and generosity. I mean, those two are one of the greatest predictors of relational quality. And you can really tell that by how someone treats people they don't know and how they treat their friends and family and what people say about them. Red flags, rapid escalation of a relationship is important.

[Iman]

Big red flag, love bombing.

[Mark Groves]

Oh, my gosh, do not go there. No, absolutely not. And what I find is that we're usually prone to love bombing because we're sort of in love with a story of being saved. And so that's a rapid escalation. So there's where you see a pace really go very fast. And what you could feel in a love bombing is a frenetic energy where it's almost like Disney. You're cast in a Disney movie, which.

[Iman]

Yeah, this is my soulmate swept off the twin flame.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Yeah, twin.

[Mark Groves]

Yeah, yeah. And. And so we're not grounded. What's really happening when we're also using terms like the one, et cetera. The problem is that we tend to tell everyone we know that we met our person. And then when they become not our person, we feel so. We feel so committed to what we said. So we often stay with them forever, which that's a problem. But the other part is that we are. We're creating one, that there's only one person. So again, you're going to operate from scarcity. Like, I have to make this work. And we're not in discernment. So we're not saying, like. The question you always need to be asking yourself in the early dating process is, is this person A match for.

[Iman]

Me and the version I am today and the person I want to evolve into becoming.

[Mark Groves]

Yeah. And those conversations about goals and values. Another red flag would be how they react to a boundary or a request like we were talking about. The green flag of that, the red flag of that. If you set a simple boundary. Very important to see how they respond because that will be great evidence of the future ways in which they respond to bigger things. I'd say the third one would be any sort of isolation. This might get further in the dating process, but any isolation from friends and family when they start criticizing the people you hang out with, your family, that's narcissistic. Yeah. It's like a classic behavior of narcissism and abuse is starting to isolate the person away. Yeah. And then becoming essentially in charge of self worth. Yeah.

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[Iman]

Can thank me later. I always say to myself, I was like, there are 8 billion people in this world. And when people are like, I don't know if I'm going to find somebody else, I'm like, there are 8 billion people. You really think your person is not out there? You really think God created you on this earth to live by yourself and in different phases depending on how you evolve, shift and change? You really think that person will not meet you there? And so I always come at everything from an abundance mindset. There's enough opportunities out there, enough clients out there, enough love out there for everybody.

[Mark Groves]

But.

[Iman]

But why do you think so much of society is programmed for this scarcity mindset?

[Mark Groves]

I think it's unconsciously a way to protect ourselves from getting hurt. We were talking about love bombing before, and what I notice about people who fall for love bombing is they're the same people who are now falling in love with AI. Because both love bombers and AI tell you what you want to hear, so you're not grounded in your own ability to discern reality and truth. I think we start to believe in things like there's no good people in Insert the City, right? I was actually just talking to someone today who's like, there's really no good quality people in LA. And I'm like, yeah, there's only what, 4 million? I don't know how many million people live in la. I was like, you don't even have to be good at math to like come up with that. You're going to probably be able to find some. I think it's a protective mechanism. So if I believe there's no people, what I'm really saying is I don't trust people and I'm choosing unconsciously people and noticing people who validate my fears and validate my beliefs. Because as you know, we are a species that really loves to only validate what is unconsciously our belief or consciously. And so we'll dismiss information that contradicts that. Like when I moved to Vancouver, I remember people said to me, it's so hard to meet people in Vancouver. I was like, really? The limited belief, like no one talks to each other.

[Iman]

Yeah, yeah, what's the deal?

[Mark Groves]

And then immediately I just started meeting people because I didn't subscribe to that. But we also try to get other people to collude with our limitations because then it starts to validate our own choices. So if I get you convinced that LA has no good people, then you're.

[Iman]

Part of that thought process.

[Mark Groves]

Exactly. And then we'll drink chardonnay and complain about it.

[Iman]

I think it's all about frequency as well. You attract into your energetic field where you're open to receiving. And that's why your own mindset and freedom of thought and independence is so important for people to have that flexibility of discernment within themselves. Right. And not to kind of fall into the traps of social media and just follow gurus or even fall into trap of AI and always be working on checking in with your internal nervous system because there's nothing better to guide you than that.

[Mark Groves]

I think we can get addicted to personal growth and addicted to growth in general. I think there's two parts to that. If you're always reading and doing things, you can be unconsciously preventing yourself from becoming something, right? So you have a lot of knowledge, but you're not implementing the knowledge. And so the other side of that is doing personal growth can become part of our identity. Because what draws, I think personal growth is great. I think learning about yourself is fantastic. I think it's important self awareness and important to understand your limitations in relationships, in life, et cetera. What usually brings you to that work is a problem, right? Like something happens. And so you naturally you'll use language like, oh, I'm just like, I'm reading this book to fix this. Which means that you have a belief that something's broken. And so I think it's great what brings you to personal growth. But what has to happen is you have to go from, I'm learning this thing about myself that needs to change, which is going to happen your whole life because you're always going to learn more. And what needs to happen is you need to switch to it being from a deficit. Like I learned something about myself that Needs to be fixed, from a deficit to being an opportunity. So now it's potential that's just untapped. So instead of trying to do personal growth work to get to the core of who we are, which is how I started, was like, oh, I'm going to figure this out. And then I figured out that as you figure something out, there's more to figure out. I'm like, this onion gets bigger, not smaller.

[Iman]

There's many layers to this.

[Mark Groves]

Yeah. And then I had a friend say to me, well, maybe instead of trying to peel a layer, you're adding a layer of power. I was like, oh, that's really great. Way better perspective. Yeah. Now I don't feel so crappy.

[Iman]

Right.

[Mark Groves]

It's amazing.

[Iman]

That's a really good way to look at things. You also talked about kindness and generosity as a green flag. And we talked about it from how you treat people. You don't know. But what about kindness and generosity? People can be really kind to strangers at times and stuff, but sometimes they can be really unkind to the most intimate relationships that they have because those are the ones that mirror back things to them. What do you think about people who go through life doing that? They're like, but I'm kind to this person. I gave them money. I'm kind to that stranger. I bought them a coffee. But when they get home, they're just nasty and petty and unkind to their partner.

[Mark Groves]

Well, there's incongruence there. I. You know, it's much like kids. Kids will express themselves with their mother especially. But mothers and parents and people they trust because they trust them. So they're like the most vulnerable relationships, so they feel more open to expressing themselves in a safer way. But in intimate relationships, although that's true, it's almost like sometimes we save the worst parts of ourselves for our. Our homes, for intimate farmers. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I think we're all prone to it. You know, where we get tired, we forget cranky. Yeah. We forget to filter. Yeah. And appreciate our partners. We take them for granted. And I think what really causes that a lot is that when you get married or you enter a partnership, there's almost like a cultural or collective assumption. And of course, every culture is going to be different, But I would say with this, most of them are the same. That now you can't go anywhere. Like, we're married. Sorry. Like, it's done. And so because we have made vows like, till death do us part or honor and obey. Right. These vows make it sound like, I guess it's just my sentence, you know. And what happens when we start to see we don't have a choice to leave is it actually removes the gratitude for the choice to stay. So I often say that if you can't leave something, you can't choose it because that autonomy that's required for the putting down of anything you're addicted to or the autonomy of expressing yourself is the same autonomy that makes the choice to participate in a relationship. So if you don't have access to. No, you don't actually have access to. Yes. And what I notice with people who tend to be maybe cranky or bring the worst parts of themselves is they probably have bad boundaries in terms of their actual personal time that they need. They probably have a lot of stuff that's going on on a much deeper level. They're probably avoiding a lot of hard conversations like the couple. And whenever we say I'm going to avoid conflict, you always end up both internalizing that conflict. So it shows up in your biology. And we also end up communicating in any ways. Like every conversation you don't have, you have.

[Iman]

Right.

[Mark Groves]

By rolling of the eyes, by crappy texting, by pushing the person away, by intimacy dying. Right. These are, is like whenever anyone has intimacy issues, it's really relational issues.

[Iman]

And that's so true because I remember when I told my ex husband, I'm like, listen, I'm leaving the relationship. He was almost shocked. He's like, you're leaving? I said, yes, the choice to stay is still a choice. And I feel the environment needs to be conducive for me to want to stay. But I said, it's a choice for me to leave. It's a choice for me to stay and I choose to leave. And I think a lot of times, especially men can take for granted that there are sometimes women flag certain things along the course of the relationship, but they, because they struggle with communication, they don't want to, you know, hear certain feedback or things happen that they want to ignore the elephant in the room. And sometimes that's why I think this statistic is that 73% of the time it's women who file for divorce. Yeah, yeah, that's how high it is. Because men are willing to live with the situation, even though it's not the best, they'll still stay with it.

[Mark Groves]

So.

[Iman]

So I think people need to remember that you always have to make a choice to choose your partner every single day. And it's a choice you make through the environment that you both co create together that creates that choice.

[Mark Groves]

Yeah. I look at my wife and I think, out of 8 billion people, she chose me. That's pretty amazing. So if I can really live in the appreciation of that choice, it means I'm gonna put in the work. Because we all have to be with the reality that our partner can leave us at any moment.

[Iman]

But a lot of people don't think the person will leave.

[Mark Groves]

They get comfortable and then they take for granted, and then that is what causes you to stop putting in the deposits. But also, when someone. You were saying women file for divorce far more than men. And by the time a woman leaves, it's been about two years. By the time anyone leaves, it's been about two years. So there's been a lot of requests, ideally, maybe not all the time. Right.

[Iman]

The timeline is exactly right, by the way. Is it? Yeah. Two, two and a half years. About.

[Mark Groves]

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I wrote an article years ago that was called Love her before she leaves you. And the idea wasn't. I wasn't writing it specifically just at men, I was just writing it more towards men because the divorce rate is so much higher, initiated by women. And what I found was that by the time someone leaves, the signs have been there for a long time. Now we're obviously talking about there's going to be a lot of complexity and a lot of different types of relational circumstances where what we're saying does not apply. But. But men also need relationship more. And what I mean by that. And I think Scott Galloway has been talking about how, like, men actually benefit from marriage more than women do. Yeah. And in the research, men are more likely to get remarried quickly. And men also, when they have an emotional challenge in their life, they turn towards their partner about two thirds of the time. When a woman has a challenge in her life, she turns to her partner about a third of the time. And that shows, like, we have so many. I want to bring compassion to what shapes men in relationship, which is that culturally, we've told men emotion is not safe and emotional intelligence is not necessarily what people are picking for. And now, wait a second. We actually want your emotional intelligence. And I think that's very conflicting for a male, especially who's older, because they have to deconstruct that. Their whole life they were doing what they were told, and they were shamed often for having emotion. And now the very reason their partner's leaving them is because they don't. And so I think we just need to hold the suffering that men have that, you know, if we take a woman who's been emotionally socialized and a man who hasn't. Whatever ages they are, that's the so if you're both 32, you've had 32 years of emotional development and they've had 32 of not not. So where is the patience and that patience for them and men us to develop? That is of course hard because if we're not showing signs of growth and change and actually moving towards actively becoming better, we're going to be left. And I would say that that departure is necessary for us to confront the grief that's going to come from that, probably anger, but also how we have to confront how society has also failed us as men. It's failed a lot of people, don't get me wrong. But I think emotionally and relationally it's failed men to not have the skill set that is now asked for.

[Iman]

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[Mark Groves]

That's tough because it's basically asking a woman to provide more emotional labor to develop the man. I'd say we'd be really probably pulling on some codependent strengths if we started to do that. When I say patience, I mean calling forward with. With boundaries. Are we going to go to therapy together? Are we going to. Are you going to. Are you going to join a men's group? Are you going to start reading books? And instead of trying to trick them by putting a podcast on in the car and being like, ah, how did this happen? Yeah, this is great. We should just listen to this synchronicity. And instead of doing that, because that's more manipulation, more trying to get them to be better. And what that can. In all relational dynamics, when one person is trying to fix people, that means the other person has to be broken.

[Iman]

And they become your project then.

[Mark Groves]

Yeah. And I always say to people that if you date unavailable people, you are unavailable. If you participate, if you tolerate bullshit in relationships, you're part of the bullshit. And so when you can actually take accountability for the colluding with someone else's small self, you are small, too. And so you have to act. By taking accountability, you take up more space, more power. And a lot of that is very hereditary. Right. So you're like, probably undoing generations of the matrilineal and patrilineal line. And a lot of men and women have a lot of healing to do together. And that's not going to come from pointing fingers at each other, but it is going to come from accountability. Yeah. And actually expressing the pain and suffering that, like, when my wife and I got back together, we. We were dating for four years, broke up, and then got back together. When we got back together, one of the parts of the processing for her was all of the programming that she had received her whole life, but also by culture of her anger at the masculine. And I'll never forget because I was sitting in the backyard of our place in Vancouver and she was getting quite elevated in her expression, which I loved. And I was like, man, you just parted my hair back. Like, that was. That was good. But I could feel that she just wanted the rage to be held, to be witnessed. And then I wasn't there to fix it. I was just there to be different. And if we're coming back to your question of, like, how do you get someone who's emotionally Unavailable to change you don't you get them to change by stop trying to get them to change because that moves you out of a childhood adaptive response of trying to get people to be different and that makes you more of an adult and then it invites them because now you're recoiling. You're like pulling your sensitivities back, your hyper vigilance, it's all being pulled back. And now there's space. And now that person has the invitation to step into the space. My wife, when we were dating was more avoidant and I was more anxious. And what I realized is I kept asking her to come towards me, but I kept taking up the space for her to move towards me. And when I finally realized that really anxious and avoidance is a relationship to space, anxious people are afraid of space and avoidant people are afraid of not having space. And when we can start to orient from that, like my work was to step back and learn how to self regulate and her work was to step forward and learn how to co regulate. And you know, that's a long answer to your question.

[Iman]

No, but it's a beautiful answer, I feel. And also I'm glad that you brought up this whole thing about attachment style. So just so funny. I was speaking to one of my best friends on the phone about to come in and I was thinking, my next relationship, you know, I'm an avoidant, by the way. But a guy friend of mine told me the other day, he's like, I think you'd be an anxious avoidant if you really felt madly in love. And I was like, why would you say that? He's like, I just feel like that would be you, even though you're an avoidant right now. And it's funny because I was talking to my friend in the car waiting for you to arrive and I was like, you know, my ideal relationship is somebody goes to work, I go to work, we come home at night, we talk and we kind of, I have my space, I just seen my space. They can hold my pinky when they sleep. And she's like, have you heard yourself? And I'm like, I can't take. I feel claustrophobic at times. So I wanted to talk about attachment styles. I know they come from, you know, there are four different attachment styles. And really you learn your attachment style based on the childhood, you know, relationship you had with your caregivers and what they provided to you. And then as we become older, that becomes a bit of our identity. But different people can activate a different style of attachment, right?

[Mark Groves]

Yeah, an attachment, really. I think about it as a radar. And everyone has one. It's a radar to check is this relationship safe? Excuse me. And ultimately asking, if I need you, will you be there? And when you start to. First the language, I am anxious. I am avoidant.

[Iman]

Don't label yourself.

[Mark Groves]

Well, as soon as you say I am, you can't not be. Yeah, right. And it's not a state. It's a reaction to relational insecurity. So for someone who's more anxious, they're hypersensitive to any sort of distancing. Even in the research, they're hyper vigilant. And they can notice facial changes that are so minute that they're reactive to any sort of indication of distress, of anger, of frustration, of whatever is a threat to the connection. Avoidant people are more about what you're talking about. There's almost like a really hypersensitized radar to a need. And so that need, when it's not coming from a congruent place, like when it's coming from a. Like a codependent, manipulative place, it's almost like an avoidant can sense the tentacle coming forward. And so whenever someone like you were talking about, they can hold my pinky at night, it's because there's some sort of fear of being enmeshed or engulfed.

[Iman]

Right.

[Mark Groves]

So I don't know if you have a history of taking care of people's needs or growing up with that type of thing.

[Iman]

I mean, I grew up in a household that was really emotionally unregulated. Both parents tended to be really volatile, and I would just have to regulate myself a lot, which I found really overwhelming. But for me, it comes from a place, and I'm working on it now to become more of a secure attachment style. It comes from a place of like, I don't trust that you can catch my falls. I will just take care of myself. Because I sometimes have chosen partners who can't provide me what I need in order to not fall, in order to not get attached, to protect myself and just tell myself the narrative, no, you need to take care of yourself. You need to keep yourself safe. Cause they don't have the capacity to. And it comes from that place of childhood where I did not feel safe.

[Mark Groves]

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so we don't even want to be too close to someone. Right. Like, I'll just take care of myself. Yeah, I got this.

[Iman]

I can leave.

[Mark Groves]

Yeah. And you know, that's. It's like you think about the whole Balance that people are doing in relationship is how do I hold on to myself and be in a relationship? How do I be a me and a we? Most of us are not that. We lose our identity in relationship. And so can we use our relationship to. Actually, I always think of it. There's three separate entities that are participating in a relationship. There's you, there's them, and there's us. And it's not a circle that engulfs us. It's actually a space between us. And so we have to think about it as being a sacred space where we're making deposits into that. Are we treating our partner and our relationship as sacred? If we all had that as an agreement, it would change everything. But can the space of the relationship that you participate in in the future, can it hold the pain of what you experience so that you can move and just increase your capacity for more closeness? Because if I all of a sudden just like move you right into closeness, you'll distance. Right. You'll probably withdraw and maybe ghost. Not you specifically, but avoidance will ghost because there's, there's. How do I. Yeah, yeah. And so the nervous system goes into flight and. Or even in a freeze. But it's like it goes into flight and, and so it's not. Actually I think about these things not as being problems that need to be fixed or like your movement from avoidance or an anxious person's movement to secure. I see all of those behaviors as being really beautiful, necessary things that are. That require compassion. And to say, you got me here. Like without you I wouldn't have been safe. So now instead of hating you, can I. And disliking you or putting you in a box and shaming you, or being ashamed of my inability for closeness or choosing unavailable people or whatever it is. How can I take what is a hyper developed skill and turn it into a superpower? So wounds when they're operating and running our relationships, we're still seeking our relationship to resolve that. We tend to unconsciously choose people that trigger us in the exact way we are most sensitive. Yeah. And so when we stop pursuing that wound with someone else and start to give us ourselves the thing we're pursuing, then we can now love people. So if you're someone who always wanted to be chosen, then you have to ask yourself, how am I not choosing myself? Because once you do that, then you're not waiting for someone else to choose you. If you know what choosing yourself feels like, you will never chase someone unavailable again. Like it just will be unattractive.

[Iman]

Right.

[Mark Groves]

You know, you'll be so embodied. And if you're afraid of being engulfed, how do you not honor space for yourself? You know, if you always wanted someone safe, do you choose safe people? Do you have good boundaries and having that awareness?

[Iman]

I think that was my biggest learning. You know, coming out of this relationship, I read the book attached and found out, okay, this is my attachment style.

[Mark Groves]

That was my gateway.

[Iman]

Yeah, that's how I got into it. And I was like, wait, how did I get here? And then I was like, oh, let me look at my childhood. Let me reflect on that. And then I said, iman, the biggest disservice you are doing to yourself in this lifetime is not allowing yourself to fully fall in love and move towards that secure attachment style. But if this relationship cannot provide you that because the, you know, the. The dynamic is not there in here, then you need to do right by yourself and allow yourself to move more towards becoming a secure attachment style and then finding a relationship that allows you to really fall in love and hold that space for you. Because what is life without falling in love? And all my friends said to me, you're only half living, and why do you want to do that to yourself?

[Mark Groves]

Yeah. I always think in my own journey, when I had the realization that I was entertaining and pursuing relationships where I felt not fully chosen, when I had the awareness that I was doing that, I wasn't so much upset anymore at the people I felt unchosen by or betrayed by. I really had a lot of sadness for. Where did I learn that that was normal? Where did I learn that not feeling fought for, advocated for. Because. Yeah, because if you don't have that, if choice isn't off the table. Right. That we. Like, we choose each other. Good. Now what? But if you're actually trying to figure out how to be chosen, you can't create any relationship from that. You'll create what looks like a relationship.

[Iman]

It's chaos, though.

[Mark Groves]

Well, what will happen, and this happens all the time, is we'll start to get our. We'll start to seek getting our wants met to replace our needs. So what I mean by that is, if I need security, I might ask you to post about us on Instagram. Because what I want is for you to tell the world we're together. But what I really want is to know that you choose me. I want to know that we're good. Let's get engaged. I want to know that we're good. Let's have a kid. And so instead of ever dealing with the underlying lack of safety. We keep chasing elation, and all we're really doing is distracting us, distracting ourselves from the truth that at the baseline we don't feel chosen. And the mind f of this is that we think it's them who's not choosing us, and so we get to be the martyr. But it's really by being with them, we are not choosing ourselves. And it's that hyper level of responsibility. It doesn't mean you can't hold the grief that you've experienced a trauma. It doesn't mean you can't hold the grief that you feel unchosen. And it's true. You just have to hold the both end that you're participating in that.

[Iman]

So you were saying for anybody listening, that being chosen, which is what we become so fixated on as a society, men and women, is not what should be driving it. It's the thing that both people walk in and say, how do we elevate each other? What do we both bring to the table? How can I take your wounds and traumas and make you feel seen and vice versa? And in that seeing each other, you're automatically chosen by each other.

[Mark Groves]

Yeah, can we just. Can we come up with the like, what are we doing? Like, are we here to do this? Are we here? Yeah. And. And then instead of taking things that are coming up between us and it being oppositional, we're actually standing shoulder to shoulder facing the thing. Because in every pattern in relationship, it's not one person stuff, although that would be nice. It's always two people. Stop. It doesn't mean that one person might not have a more toxic pattern, but we're still participating in it. And that can be a hard complexity to hold because you'll often hear someone say, that's victim blaming, but that's only under the idea that it's either all your responsibility or none of it. You know what I mean? So it's either like you experience trauma or it's happening to you versus for you, but it happens to you and for you. And that is a hard bridge. You can't just tell someone who's been through trauma, oh, this happened for you. That's like such gaslighting and such dismissing of their actual pain and suffering. Instead, you work through that part and then move it to what's the wisdom? We can't change what happened, but we can actually change how we use what happened. And when relationships enter that space where we say, what are we creating together? And what you said, how do we. Can I get awareness about my pain? That I'm bringing to the relationship. Can I get awareness about your pain and how do we hold space for both of those to be healed?

[Iman]

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[Mark Groves]

Yeah.

[Iman]

So in that torn apart, some people get into this whole victim mentality. I can't believe this happened to me. This person did, this person did this. But they also need to take the accountability of why they chose that person and where they feel themselves in choosing that person and tell themselves, I guess I learned these are the lessons. This is where I failed myself. But this is the things I'm gonna watch out for next time so I don't end up back feeling like shattered into pieces, can't get back up.

[Mark Groves]

I think breakups offer such a unique window of opportunity. Whether you're left or leave. There's not many times in your life that you're between a pattern and so you have this opportunity to look back and do basically a postmortem on the relationship and and want to understand how did I show up? Why did I choose who I chose? What could I have done differently? Also, if we experience betrayal, what I have noticed in my own life is that all of my external betrayals all the ways I've been betrayed were always preceded by an internal betrayal. So I always got to the place where I was betrayed because somewhere before in the process, I betrayed myself. I didn't honor what I knew, I didn't honor how I felt. I didn't stand in my boundaries. And then inevitably, you end up in the circumstances that get created by misalignment, which, of course, is the universe's way of kicking you back into alignment. And that ability or desire or willingness to actually say, I'm going to go so deep into this process of loss, I'm going to use the pain that I have. And I definitely recommend going through your breakup sober, because if you do it sober, you will be. Yeah. And all the ways in which we anesthetize our grief, we don't realize that grief is one of the most potent vehicles for transformation. That's why things like depression are so rooting, because you can't move, so it demands to be felt. And if you think of the word depression. Right, we're depressing feelings. And I subscribe to the idea that anxiety and depression are really the experience from repressing core feelings, not being able to express different ways in our lives, anger, grief, sadness, joy, whatever it might be. And if you're willing to actually confront that and actually confront what you've been through, you can change your relationship patterns. You can become a completely different person. You can start an Instagram account like I did. You can do so many things. When I went through that engagement ending when I was 20, that was the moment where everything changed. And you don't even know that when you're going through that, that it's actually birthing something different in you and what you're talking about, like the liberation that comes. I remember hearing in Glennon Doyle's book, there's a quote from Elizabeth Gilbert in it, and she says, there's no such thing as one way liberation. If you're free, they're free, too. They just don't know it yet. So, you know, what is your freedom is your partner's freedom.

[Iman]

Yeah. And I remember saying that towards the end, I said, one day you're going to look back and actually thank me for having the courage to leave so that we can both lead a really fulfilled life the way we want to, without the other one forcing it down the other's throat. And I said, what I'm actually doing right now is choosing kindness in a way, even though it doesn't feel like that at the moment.

[Mark Groves]

Yeah. And for the other person, right? It's. It can be, especially in the initial part, easier to hold the blame, right? Like, easier to make the other person the villain. Because if the other person is the villain, then I could say that I didn't see it coming. I could say you didn't give me enough notice, you didn't share what you needed. And maybe some of that can be true. But at the end of the day, you're not together anymore. And one of the greatest ways in which I see people continue and perpetuate their suffering post breakup is not accepting that it's over. You can want to get back together with someone, but don't let the want to get back together with them actually remove you from the reality that you're not together. And so they keep watching Instagram stories, and it's just like they're listening to Adele. Like, if you want to suffer, just listen to Adele in a post breakup. I'm so glad I wasn't around when I went through my early breakups.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

I know.

[Iman]

Because maybe you wouldn't get out of bed if that was the case.

[Mark Groves]

I was listening to Boyz I Men End on the Road, and that was a. I mean, that one will put you in the suffering train 100%.

[Iman]

That'll, like, make you melancholic.

[Mark Groves]

RB love ballads from the 90s come on.

[Iman]

For people listening and just coming towards the end of the episode, people have this. We spoke about it right in the beginning that people have this limited belief that it's so hard to go out there, meet people. They're not like you and I saying there are 8 billion people in this world. Your person is out there. So for women who are going through a breakup or a divorce or going through this process or just looking for love, where should they start?

[Mark Groves]

Come alive. Like, come fully alive within themselves. Yes. You follow your passions. Like, you didn't leave a relationship or get left so you could just stay average. Like, you didn't do it so you could keep avoiding your dreams or living your passions. Like, go, become so fully alive. Go do what you love. Read the books you always wanted to travel, do the thing, exercise, get in shape. You know, get a revenge body, get a revenge soul. Like, I think about it like, the best path to put yourself on is complete alignment. And if we want to find a partner who is aligned with our values, we have to be aligned with our values. And what I notice in most of the people that I work with is what. What ultimately always needs to be resolved is one clarity about what their values are and and cleaning up their misalignment with their values. Once you do that, you feel free. And also when you have unlived potential, you create the doorway for addiction. So if you know something needs to change in your life and you're not changing it, you're creating suffering, you're creating your inner being knows that you know something and you're not doing it. So you are the source of your own self abandonment. And when you do that, you create the template and the framework and the frequency of that. And you will just keep matching with people who require your self abandonment because you live in it, if that makes sense.

[Iman]

Amen. So one of the big things for me going through this was I need to become the woman that I want to attract a certain type of partner. But that work lies with me.

[Mark Groves]

Yeah.

[Iman]

Number one and two, I'm going to live my life in the most full spectrum of color and live it to its utmost potential. Because I'm living for me and creating from that place of abundance, joy, fulfillment, love and beautiful relationships with family, with friends. And until I find that person and that frequency is what's going to get me there.

[Mark Groves]

Yeah, it's beautiful. I think if we all aspire to become the person we seek, what it does is if we're thinking, oh, there's no one, no good people out there first. The more aligned you get, the more you become the evidence of the existence of alignment. So you're already disproving your own belief. The second part is that when you do that, you put yourself in circumstances that put you in the pathway to find someone. Years ago I wrote this, I'll call it a poem, I guess, where I said, I hope that you live with the courage to. I hope that you don't live your life loving with half your heart because you're afraid that I won't be at the coffee shop where we're meant to meet. And the idea was like, why would you stay in something that doesn't fulfill you? Because you don't trust that I'm going to be where we're supposed to be be. And I think when we live with that idea, there's a great quote. I forget who it's from, but it's such a beautiful quote where what's meant for me will never miss me. And what misses me is never meant for me. And I think if we can aspire to live from that doesn't mean we're not going to have the humanness of feeling sad or grief or that life's not working out. But whenever you start to feel like life's not working out. That's where we have to come back to the practices that allow us to say, okay, I'm in the exact perfect place. Can I embrace everything that's going on in my life? And can I eat everything on the plate? Can I just maximize what's what I. The work I need to do.

[Iman]

Now, even religion teaches you that, you know, and I'm Muslim, so in Islam there's a really famous saying, and it basically goes, what is meant for you will find you. Even if it's beneath between two mountains and what's not meant for you, even if it's between your lips, it will not be yours.

[Mark Groves]

Oh, that's good.

[Iman]

So it can be so close. But if it's not meant to be yours, there's no way it will be. But even if it's hiding between two mountains and if it's meant to be yours, God will send it your way. And I think that a lot of religions teach that faith teaches that and the faith in yourself and knowing that if you walk your path and you walk with authenticity and integrity, to you first, not to somebody else, the right opportunities, the right people, the right love will show up to match that.

[Mark Groves]

Yeah. Amen. Beautifully said.

[Iman]

Thank you so much for taking out the time while you were in Miami and coming on our show. I've obviously loved your work and you've been such a big source of inspiration and peace in my process. So to be able to bring you to my community has been such a joy. Where can everybody find you besides create the love that I have?

[Mark Groves]

Yeah. Well, thanks so much for having me.

[Iman]

Of course.

[Mark Groves]

What an honor to be in Miami and get this as an experience. And thank you to all of you who are watching or listening. I really appreciate you trading time for that. I don't take that for granted. You can find [e-mail] and you can also find me on Substack and also the Mark Groves podcast.

[Iman]

And on the substack are people getting weekly updates, bi weekly updates. Because I love a good substack.

[Mark Groves]

I love Substack. I think it actually might be the solution to human attention because we need more long form content. We do, yeah. And so, yeah, on there I do weekly newsletters. I do almost daily notes. I love it. I'm loving it.

[Iman]

I think everyone's gonna love it. I'm gonna sign up to your substack after this.

[Mark Groves]

Thank you.

[Iman]

Thank you again so much. And your advice has been so life changing for me. And so I'm so grateful for my community to get to know you.

[Mark Groves]

Thank. You.