Mark Groves – Human Connection Specialist
So, 12 years ago, almost to the day actually, I was moving into a new house that I just bought with a girlfriend that I’d been dating for five years. And on the day that we were moving in together, I planned on getting engaged. I planned on it, right? So that was the plan.
So, I got to the house early to sort of set the stage, and I got there and laid out some roses from the front door that led in, and – I know what you’re thinking, like, very cliche. But I didn’t have Pinterest back then, so this was like my best work, okay? Stay with me though.
So she gets to the house, she walks in, she follows the roses. I think, like, for women, if you lay out roses, there’s just something in their DNA where they just follow. So she follows them to the kitchen, and on the island is a takeout container from our favorite restaurant. She opens the container, and, inside, it says, “Will you marry me? Yes/No,” and there’s a pen hanging, and she checks “yes.” Right? So, we did it. Okay. It gets worse before it gets better. In that moment, for the first time in my life that I can remember, I’m sort of, like, outside of me, like the Matrix, in a way – don’t worry, it’s not a woo-woo talk.
So, I’m thinking about how I’m feeling, I’m sort of like watching us celebrate, and I’m really observing my feelings, and I’m thinking, “I think I should be more excited than this.” And before I’d gotten engaged, I was quite nervous about it, I felt anxious. I would talk to people that I trusted, and I asked their advice, and they’d say things like, “I think you’re just afraid of commitment.” And I thought, “Well maybe I am, but maybe it’s something more than that.”
And so I would spend all my spare moments on the internet, searching for things like “How do you know if she’s the one?” Yeah.
And the second question she asked me was: “Can you imagine what it would be like waiting for her at your altar – whatever your altar is?” And I thought, no, that like made my stomach hurt, made me anxious. And the third question she asked me was: “Can someone else love her better?” Phew! Yeah, and she was worthy of that. She was and is an amazing woman. And that question was actually the first time I ever even considered the situation outside of my selfish bubble. It was: How will this affect me? What will people think if the relationship ends? I don’t want to hurt anyone.
It was like, wow, this fear of stepping into my truth or honoring whatever my feelings were, I wasn’t allowing her the opportunity to have the relationship she was worthy of. So I invite you, if you’re in a relationship, or even to think of your past partner, to ask yourself: “Can someone else love them better?” And if the answer is “yes,” then, of course, why are you leaving that gap? Because if you don’t fill it, someone else will. And, of course, the follow-up question to that is: “Do you want to?” And for me, I didn’t want to. And I didn’t know why, I just knew that I didn’t want to, and my truth was that I needed to end the relationship. So I did.
But on the day that that engagement story ended, that part of my story was sort of like the beginning of this amazing journey that has brought me to this stage today. I, since that moment, have been obsessed with understanding relationships, with understanding the science and psychology of why they work and why they don’t, and why are we attracted to people who are not good for us, often? And why, when things are terribly bad, do we have such a problem leaving relationships – if we even do? And why, when someone’s actually ready to show up for us and love us, we’re like, “They’re too nice”? Right? And it’s unattractive. Like, that’s messed up!
And I thought, “Why is it that if relationships matter to us so much, that we don’t take the time to learn about them and to be really good at them? Now, I have the belief that we are all obsessed with relationships, because no matter where I go – coffee shops, the seawall – people are talking about their relationship stuff. They will pin you against the wall if you ask “How is your relationship?” And I don’t have the research to support this statement, but I am almost certain that more coffee and wine is consumed on the subject of and the recovery from relationships – right – than anything else. So I might decline sales in those areas after this talk, hopefully. So, if we’re so obsessed with it, why? Because when relationships are great, they’re amazing.
I love this painting from Laura Banzan Martin because it’s everything. It’s why we’re here; we’re here to connect. But when relationships don’t work, they’re devastatingly painful. Relationships literally – love literally affects our hearts. In a study where they gave people a wound on their arm, they saw that if they were in high-conflict relationships, they actually healed slower. And John Gottman, who’s like the godfather of – that’s my God, by the way – he’s the godfather of relationship research – I know, it wasn’t good – he saw that if he was observing a couple that were seemingly fine and he measured their physiological responses, if they were in a high-conflict relationship, their bodies were responding like they were beside a tiger. Is that crazy? Our bodies don’t know the difference between a high-stress job, a high-stress life, and a high-stress relationship.
So you imagine, if it just affects a small wound on your arm, that healing, what does it do when we’re fighting things like heart disease or cancer? And if really bad relationships, or challenging ones, can affect our health in a negative way, can positive ones help us heal, maybe, or preserve our health? And the answer is yes. In the longest-running study on happiness, the Harvard men’s study – which now includes women, about time – they saw it wasn’t your blood pressure or your cholesterol that predicted your health at 80, it was the quality of your relationships at 50.
Yeah. But not just romantic relationships, relationships of all kinds – friendship, family. Because the skill set of being able to connect to another human being and communicate effectively is the most important skill we can develop. And the other thing is, love with another person is probably the most challenging thing that we’ll all face because love requires us to look at the things we’re not good at; it requires us to accept them, and you know the areas of development that were talked to us about? We have relational areas of development too. And really deeply fulfilling loving relationships require so much humility, but they also require so much more courage.
When we actually begin this journey of understanding – which I did, and I didn’t know it was called this till I got to this stage of my career – building relational awareness. Essentially, that’s a fancy way of saying “What is my stuff?” And then, how does my stuff play with their stuff? Which actually sounds dirty when I think about it, but – My stuff, your stuff … What is my stuff and what is their stuff and how does it relate? And anyone we relate to, our stuff relates to. And when we actually look at the research on why we do what we do, we see that about 95% to 99% of what we do is subconscious. Isn’t that crazy? One to five percent of what we do is conscious. That doesn’t seem good! Right?
And so what’s happening is from birth to around seven, we are literally learning how to walk and how to talk, that’s important, but we’re learning how to be part of a society; how to be part of a culture; how to be part of a religion; we’re learning how to be part of a family. We’re essentially learning how to fit in, we’re learning how to become who we need to be in order to be loved by the people around us. And in some way we’re abandoning ourselves, our true selves, in some sense. We’re learning what it means, as we heard earlier, to be a little boy or a little girl.
We’re learning what our relationships are supposed to look like; we’re learning how we’re supposed to act in relationships. If you think about our minds being like a computer, these are sort of the programs that are running in the background. This will likely be the only time I ever say this, but I actually want to be the programmer. Like, this is the only time that I really want to get into this. We have to understand what they are because they shape what we choose. And in order to do that, we have to start to look at our childhood. Don’t worry, I’m not going to, like, Freud you on the couch right now, but this is me as a little boy.
And I was forced to ask myself some challenging questions, like, what did I observe, and what was I explicitly taught about relationships and communication? And I invite you to explore that too because it matters a lot. I think some of the messages I was sent was, like, get married by 25 to 27, have kids by 30, and if you don’t do that, you’re kind of broken. Or men are bad at communicating; men are afraid of commitment. I got, don’t do an arts degree, because they don’t make money. Do a business degree, or become a lawyer or a doctor because you’re going to have to be a good provider.
There’s so many messages that we receive, and they don’t just come from family, they come from marketing as well. This is an actual booklet from the 1950s. Right? Learn how to train your wife, in five easy lessons – which we know is obviously misleading because it’s way more lessons than that. I was like: how’s that joke going to go, I’m not sure, um … Especially after the Marine’s talk earlier.
But look at this: so teach her how to fetch your slippers and pipe when you sit quietly while you browse your favorite TV stations, or respond to nonverbal cues such as snapping of the fingers – which I know is a quick way to lose my fingers in my house. But all joking aside, this is funny, but it’s not. Because imagine being a little boy or a little girl and this is a book on your coffee table. What message does this send? And those little boys and little girls are our parents, or maybe our grandparents, or maybe even some of us. When we actually think of relational understanding and education, unless we seek outside education on communication and relationships, the education we get is from our family. Right?
So if we’ve never seen conflict turned into intimacy, how would we know how? So if you just look at your family tree, and you go up five generations and assume no divorce, you have 30 people’s stuff funneling into you, like bags of luggage just dropping on you, like: deal with this.
And then if you’re in a relationship with someone, you’ve got 30 people’s stuff coming down here too – assuming no divorce – and if you’re polyamorous, you’ve got tons of people’s stuff – that’s a whole other bag. So you have 30 people’s stuff, and then you got this person with 30 people’s stuff, and you’re like, why your stuff? Like, of all the people I see in this U-Haul you’re towing, I’ve seen your family. Why you? But I think you’re, you’re – Yeah! I want this. But why? Right? And you hear people say things like, “I never want to become like my parents,” and then inevitably the relationships become exactly like their parents’.
Or you hear you marry your opposite-sex parent, right? But that’s not entirely true. We are attracted to and tend to choose people who wound us in a similar way as a parent who wounded us the most. Or somebody who raised us. So what is a wound? A wound is any need that doesn’t get adequately met.
Now, we can’t possibly get all our needs met, let’s just get that clear. As a kid, though, you don’t even have language for the first part of your life, so you can’t possibly express it, anyway. None of us escaped childhood without wounds. Let’s just get clear; we’re all wound sharing – this is the trust tree. Okay?
So, you can think about a wound being like when you touch the stove and burn your hand, you change the way, hopefully, you behave around the stove. And the same is true for love. When you burn your heart, even as a child, you change your behavior around love.
And so, why do we choose these people? What I’ve noticed from just working with thousands of people, the answer to this question is consistently related to what drives us in love. And the question is: “What I wanted most as a child and didn’t get was … ” So think about that. “What I wanted most as a child and I didn’t get was … ” Now, the answer to this question will be the thing we tend to long for most from our partner.
Now, for most of us, the answer to this question will be something like to feel chosen, to be important, to feel understood, to feel safe, to feel like I’m enough. This will be the thing we most want from them. It’s not one-sided, right, where it’s like it’s not me, it’s you. They’ll want something from us too. It’d be nice if it was just – but, no, it’s both-sided.
Now what can happen is the opposite, and what I mean by that is if we had a parent who wasn’t around or left or just was withdrawn, we might be attracted to people who are overwhelming and smothering, maybe controlling, but balance is not found on the other end of the pendulum, it’s found in the middle, right? So the answer to this question is so powerful in building our relational awareness because we begin to understand what it is that drives us, and what we want in relationship, what we’re constantly seeking. Because what we’re doing is we’re seeking to heal it. In a way, I like to call it “wound chemistry.” Because we’re seeking – the mistake we’ve been making up until this point, for the most part, is that we’ve been waiting for someone else to give it to us; we’ve been waiting for someone else to choose us, to prioritize, to love us.
But the healing comes from us doing it. We are choosing these people, and they’re wounding us because they’re inviting us to heal, and when we do that, we take all these inherited familial patterns, and we begin to heal, we begin to heal our family. The answer to this question is so powerful because when we do the healing, we take the responsibility away from the people we’re pursuing or our partners. So they can just love us.
When we do this, we begin to take massive responsibility for our relationships. I mean, we don’t get to choose what family we’re born into – although there are some existential views that we do choose a family, but that’s a whole other TED Talk – so what I say, you don’t get to choose your family, and you don’t get to choose, necessarily, everything that happens to you. And you can’t change your past, none of us can change our past.
But we are responsible for everything that we have. We’re responsible for everything that’s on our plate. And when we do that, we take these patterns that we’ve inherited, and we change them – we change them by changing ourselves. These wounds occurred in relationship, and that’s where they get healed. I love this statue from Burning Man 2015 by Alexander Milov because this is all of us, right?
Whenever I see this picture, I’m just like, whoa! Because as adults, we get angry, right? We get upset, we yell, we withdraw, and we turn our backs. When, really, in all of us is this child that says, “Love me, connect with me, don’t turn your back.” Our work is not to learn how to love, because we’re born knowing that. It’s to learn how to remove the barriers we have to love. It’s to actually give this child a voice. It’s to give birth to this child, who is in all of us, the person that we, in some ways, or maybe a lot of ways, left behind when we were becoming who we needed to be in order to be loved by the people around us.
There is no magic pill to relationships, right? We’re trying to hack everything. You can’t hack relationships. I’m sorry. But when we actually do the work, when we actually build relational awareness, when we understand what our stuff is and how it relates, any of us can have amazing relationships, any one of us.
When my engagement ended 12 years ago, I asked myself: “How did I get so disconnected from me?” And the answer was so simple, it was that I avoided every hard conversation. So I want to ask you: what hard conversations are you avoiding? I made the promise on the day of that realization, and it was a very hard promise to keep, that I would have every conversation I didn’t want to have, because those are the ones that matter. We avoid hard conversations because, as a society and a culture, we have made being in a relationship more important than being honest and truthful.
Just look at how we celebrate anniversaries instead of the depth of connection. If we want to have deeply fulfilling relationships, we have to be willing to have very hard conversations with ourselves. And so I invite you to consider: Are you doing your best? Are you living and loving at your best? And if you’re not, why? Like, now is the time. I teach relationships and relational wellness and how to be awesome at them because how we love matters so much. And when we actually do this work, we don’t just heal ourselves, and not just the family tree of all the people that dropped their bags on us, but we also heal the generations that come after us; we heal our children.
And when we do that, we free them to live the life that they’re worthy of living so they don’t have to spend it recovering from their childhood. Thank you.
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