Why Most Relationships Fail (And How to Choose Better)

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. When people break up, you describe it like you're being torn apart to be 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?LYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLYLY I want to talk a little bit about your personal journey and what made you come to the place of Create the Love. 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 burst 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 greater love. Which actually works better in a way, right? It's so much better. Create the Love in every aspect of your life. Yeah, it was a 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 about my feelings? Like that's not a, there's not a skill set issue. There's something else going on. 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'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, were cool. Now sub-stack is cool. And I, I was dating a woman who ran social media for businesses. And she said, oh, 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 to create the love in 2013 or 2014, one of them. And I guess as they say, the rest is history. 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. Beautiful. 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 acts. I still treat him like family. He's always going to be family to me, but he just was an 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 where you're leaving? And I'm like, no, I have 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 relationships. I do not serve them out of fear or gaslighting them that, oh, maybe something better is 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 pages being 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 in 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. Well, yeah, you know, it's ironic to think, and I think it's a tough tension to hold 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 a relationship. Now, look, of course, relationships require compromise, but they don't require self abandonment. Those are two different things. 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 you're a 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. And that is the piece of self abandonment. And I have 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 an 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. 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. Oh, you know, why do we not start with like cleared 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 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. 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. I don't like it. But it's liberating. Right. 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? 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, 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 in 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'm 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 the pictures. So she responded with a sunset. 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, damn. Intuition. A woman's intuition. Yeah. I was thinking like no games here. She's a little confronted by it. Yeah. How did that make you feel? Like in your life? 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 Jason 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 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 90's term. I'll throw back. But it's still applies. It's 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 a big red flag love bombing. 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 your cast in a Disney movie, which this is my soul mate. It's swept off my feet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and so we're not grounded. What's really happening when 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 you all 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. Yeah. 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 me? And the version I am today and the person I want to evolve into becoming. Yeah. And 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 said 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. And 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. Yeah. And then becoming essentially in charge of self-worth. Yeah. If you are taking protein powder, you definitely need to hear this. The Clean Label Project tested 160 different proteins from different vendors and brands across the US. And you're going to be shocked at the discovery that they made nearly half of the top selling proteins in the US tested high for lead. And if you're somebody who consumes protein powder daily, this is something you have to be concerned about. And to make matters worse, most brands do not value transparency and will not reveal their test data online. 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So if you want something clean, delicious, and bioavailable with transparency, go now to get this amazing discount. puri.com. Puri.com slash biohacket. Switch over to PURY's PW1 protein, and you 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. But why do you think so much of society is programmed for this scarcity mindset? I think it's unconsciously a way to protect ourselves from getting hurt. We were talking about love bombing before, and what I noticed 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, four million, I don't know how many people live in LA. I was like, you don't even have to be good at math till I 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, we are a species that really loves to only validate what is unconsciously or relief 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. Yeah. Yeah. And what's the deal? And then immediately I just started meeting people. Yeah. Because I didn't, 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 part of that thought path. Exactly. And then we'll drink Shardinay and complain about it. 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. 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. 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 it, I think personal growth is great. I think learning about yourself is fantastic. I think it's important self-awareness and important understanding your limitations and relationships and life, etc. What usually brings you to that work is a problem, right? Like something happens. And so you naturally 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, right? 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 with 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. And I'm like, this onion gets bigger, not smaller. Many layers to this. 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 a really great way to look at it. That's a great way to look at it. Yeah. Now I don't feel so crappy. Right. It's amazing. It'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 time 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 and 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. Well, there's in congruence there. 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 homes for intimate partners. Yeah. And I think we're all prone to it. You know, where we get tired, we forget. Great. Yeah. We forget to have a shelter. 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 know, 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 way. It's like every conversation you don't have you have by rolling of the eyes, by crappy texting, by pushing the person away, by intimacy dying. These are like whenever anyone has intimacy issues, it's really relational issues. 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 think 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 they're 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, that's how high it is. Because men are willing to live with a situation even though it's not the best, they'll still stay with it. So I think people need to remember that you always have to make a choice to choose your partner every single day. And the choice you make through the environment that you both co-create together that creates that choice. Yeah, I look at my wife and I think out of 8 billion people, she chose me. Like, that's pretty amazing. So if I can really live in the appreciation of that choice, it means I'm going to put in the work. Because we all have to be with the reality that our partner can leave us at any moment. But a lot of people don't think the person will leave. 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. Yeah. 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? A timeline is exactly right. By the way, yeah, two, two and a half years about, 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 men also need relationship more. And what I mean by that, and I think Scott Galaway has been talking about how like men actually benefit from marriage more than women. 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, 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 is 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, 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 had 32 years of emotional development and they've had 32 of 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 this skill set that is now asked for. If you know me, you know, I'm intentional about what I put into my body. That's why I'm so excited to share something that's genuinely changed my wellness and routine. Seeds new, cobiotics. Cobiotics are supplements designed to support your body and microbiome. The community of microbes that plays a major role in nutrition, energy recovery, immunity, and honestly every single part of your health. The three formulas, DMO2, daily multivitamin, AMO2, energy focus, and PMO2 sleep plus restore, working sync with your biology to fill nutrient gaps, boost clean energy without caffeine and support deep restorative sleep, which I promise you, you all need more than you know. What really stands out to me about seeds, cobiotics is a capsule and capsule design. It is absolutely genius. Each capsule delivers two formulations, one for the body and one for the microbiome. So both systems get what they need to work in sync with each other. I love that it's grounded in real science, but I also feel it day to day. More bounce energy, better focus, and genuinely deeper sleep. Want to experience the next level support for yourself? Visit seed.com slash biohack and use my code biohack20 for 20% off your first order. Now let's get back to the show. When people meet in Luzzi, you just said you're the same age, so 32 years or 42 years or whatever it may be, and women have shown a certain way, and men have shown a certain way. And you get into a partnership, into a relationship and you're both the same age. How can we, our female audience listening to this, if they meet a man and he's not emotionally available? How do we guide them to become more emotionally available and to reprogram themselves while still having patients within ourselves? 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 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, well, 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. And they become your project then? Yeah. And I always say to people that if you date unavailable people, you are unavailable. If you participate, if you tolerate bullshit 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 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 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 you're now you're you're recoiling. You're like pulling your your sensitivities back your your hyper vigilance. It's all being pulled back in another 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 avoiding 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. 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 think in my next relationship, you know, I'm an avoidant by the way. And 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, I have my space. I just need my space. They can hold my pinky when they sleep. And you heard yourself. And I'm like, I can't take it. I feel claustrophobic at times. So I wanted to talk about attachment styles. I know they come from, you know, they're 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. You right? 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. As soon as you say, I am, you cannot 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. Avoiding people are more about what you're talking about. There's almost like a really high-percentised 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 consensus, 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. Right. 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. 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 fall. So 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 because they don't have the capacity to. And it comes from that place of childhood where I did not feel safe. 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. I got this. I can leave. 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 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. You know, 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. Avoidance will gross. Because there's, there's a how do I be? Yeah. And so the nervous system goes into flight and or even into freeze, but it's like it goes into flight. 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. Yeah. 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 hyperdeveloped 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. It just will be unattractive. You'll be so embodied. And if you're afraid of being engulfed, how do you not honor space for yourself? If you always wanted someone safe, do you choose safe people? Do you have good boundaries? And having that awareness, I think that was my biggest learning coming out of this relationship. I read the book if I know, okay, this is my attachment style. That was my gateway. Yeah, that's how I got into it. And I was like, wait, how did I get here? And I was like, oh, let me look at my child. Let me reflect on that. And then I said, I'm on 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 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? Yeah, I always think of 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. It's chaos, huh? Well, what will happen in 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 a nation. 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. So you're 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? They make you feel seen and vice versa. And in that seeing each other, you're automatically chosen by each other. 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 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 stuff. 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 know, 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 experienced 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? As someone who's always drawn to wellness products that are simple, effective and actually help you understand your body, which is why I'm so excited to share the hormones, umor by vibrant wellness, a company I love and trust. It's an advanced at-home test that gives you real insight into your energy, mood and overall balance. That's why trust vibrant. 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When you talk about it, when people break up, you describe it like you're being torn apart to be put back together. 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, 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 going to watch out for next time. So I don't end up back feeling like shattered into pieces, can't get back up. 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 post-mortem on the relationship 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 experienced betrayal, what I've 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, that ability or desire of 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, we're depressing feelings. And I subscribe to the idea that anxiety and depression are really the, 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 27. 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 there free too, they just don't know it yet. So, you know, what is your freedom is your partner's freedom? 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 others 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. Yeah, I'm 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 and post-breakup. I'm so glad it wasn't around when I went through my early breakups. I know because maybe when you get out of bed if that was the case. I was listening to boys to men in the road. And that was I mean, that one I'll put you in the suffering train. A hundred percent. That'll like make you malencollege. I mean, do you love ballots from the 90s? Come on. For people listening and just coming towards the end of the episode, people have this. We spoke about it right in the beginning. The people are have this limited belief that it's so hard to go out there meet people. They're not like you and I saying they're eight 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? 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 want 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 cleaning up their misalignment with their values. Once you do that, you feel free. And also when you have unlimited 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. 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. Yeah. 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 until I find that person. And that frequency is what's going to get me there. Yeah, that'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? And I think when we live with that idea, there's a great quote I forget who it's from, but it's the 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, it doesn't mean we're not going to have the humanness of feeling sad or grief or that life's not working out. But when 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 mean 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 now? Even religion teaches you that, you know, and I must say I'm so an 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. Oh, that's good. 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 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. Yeah, Amen. Beautifully said. 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 had. Yeah. Well, thanks so much for having me. Of course. One 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 me at margroves.com and you can also find me on substack and also the margroves podcast. And on the substack are people getting weekly updates, buy weekly updates because I love a good substacks. I love substack. I think it actually might be the solution to human attention because we need more long form. We do. Yeah. And so yeah, on there, I do weekly newsletters. I do almost daily notes. I love it. I'm loving it. I think everyone's going to love it. I'm going to sign up to a substack after this. Thank you. 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. Thank you.