A question arrives with a confession inside it. The person asking has been hung up on someone for more than a year, and the awkward detail is that the two of them were never actually dating. He is, by their account, "the nicest person I've ever met." He is secure, independent, and kind. He moved away for a while, came back, and now they are friends, yet the person asking is still standing exactly where they stood a year ago, in what they call the friend zone, turning the same question over and over: what is wrong with me? In a six-and-a-half-minute video published in May 2020, relationship coach and podcaster Mark Groves takes that question apart. His answer is not really about the man at all. It is about availability, the stories we tell ourselves about being chosen, and the quiet protection that unavailable people provide. Below is his argument, the practical steps he suggests, and the reason "getting over" someone you never had may begin with a different question than the one most people ask.
Groves starts from the answer that most people need to hear first: nothing is wrong with you. "You're human, and then it's okay, it happens," he says at the top of the exchange. The mechanics, as he describes them, are familiar. We get into obsessive thinking. We want to change someone's behavior. We want them, finally, to choose us, and we want it badly enough that the want starts to feel like the whole story.
The first thing he does is reframe the phrase the asker keeps using. The person says they like to think they are secure in themselves. Groves points out that the attachment itself is evidence of something else. The asker had caught the contradiction on their own: a person who was secure would not spend a year circling someone who had moved away. "You caught it yourself," he tells them. The obsession is not a verdict on their worth. It is information about where their security is still under construction.
This is the pattern at the center of the video, and Groves names it plainly. We pursue people who do not choose us. We chase people who are unavailable, sometimes people who are outright difficult, and then, when we finally meet someone genuinely kind, we discover they are already in a relationship. The story we build around that discovery is revealing. We tell ourselves that all the great people are taken, so the only way in is to wait for them to break up, and then we sit by the phone. "You're like, call me," he says, and then imagines the reply: "I can't call you, I just tried to mend my relationship."
He is careful not to pile shame on top of this. The pattern is common, and it is easy to recognize once someone describes it out loud. But he treats it as an inventory, not a sentence. If you keep choosing people who cannot choose you back, the useful question is what you are getting from that arrangement.
Here the video makes its most distinctive move. Ordinarily, when someone is stuck on a partner who treats them poorly, the advice comes quickly and bluntly: get rid of him. Groves notes that this response is ready to hand, and that no one can reach for it here, because the man in question is kind. That kindness is exactly what makes the situation hard to leave. Nice and unavailable is a combination that gives you nothing to push against and nothing clear to walk away from.
His reply is a single line that reorganizes the whole problem. "He's the nicest person I've ever met," he repeats back, then says the person has taught them something important: the type of person they are interested in. The next step is not to find the one perfect man. It is to widen the frame. Groves reaches for the idea of a scarce world, in which this one person seems like the only option, and then corrects it. There are, he says, something like seven billion people. "You don't even have to be good at math," he adds, and even a poor calculator arrives at more than one. His instruction is to look for someone who is nice and available, and interested in you.
Before concluding that the relationship is hopeless, Groves asks a question that many people in this position have never seriously answered: have you ever actually declared what you want? Have you said that you care about them, that you are interested in a relationship with them? If not, he argues, you are holding on to a possibility without ever giving the other person a real chance to respond. "If you never actually take a shot, you never hit it," he says, attributing the line to Michael Jordan.
He gives concrete language for doing it. If he were in the asker's place, he says, he would tell the man directly: I am actually interested in you, I feel like there is chemistry here, and I would be interested in dating. The honest answer may still be no, and Groves acknowledges that. But a no you have heard is a different thing from a maybe you have been constructing alone. The other side of that conversation is also clear. If the answer is no, the way forward may involve stepping back from the friendship altogether. He offers two versions of that: explaining that you cannot hold the friendship while your feelings are unresolved, or saying simply that you can no longer be around him in the same way.
Groves then asks the asker to examine something older. Did you have a parent who was around but never really chose you? Someone who seemed available, who was physically present, but who did not show up emotionally in a way that made you feel picked? He suggests this can be the place where we learn to think about someone incessantly without ever moving toward them. We keep the vigil going, and nothing advances.
He ties this to rumination. Children who ruminate, he says, can grow into adults for whom worry becomes a trap of self-sabotage. The reasoning is direct. When we worry, we are not functioning at a high level, and the cost shows up in the body as well as the mind, including effects on the immune response. Worry also holds us hostage, because it feels like effort while producing no progress at all. The loop looks like action from the inside. From the outside, nothing moves.
The most useful sentence in the video may be the one about power. "We think that when we're dating, we're waiting to be chosen," Groves says. His correction is that you have to date from the space of choosing. Waiting places your power outside yourself, in the hands of someone who has not picked you. Choosing puts it back where you can use it.
He pushes this into the question of self-love. If you truly loved yourself, he suggests, you would make choices that make you feel worthy of receiving someone who can show up as available and kind. This is not an accusation that you do not care for yourself. He frames it as an upgrade. Your security and your worth grow when you make choices that match what you say you want, instead of rehearsing the same wish in silence. The person asking has been stuck in a loop they have not yet been able to see from the inside, and the way out runs through action rather than more analysis.
He also points to the asker's own phrasing as a clue. They have always been drawn to people who are moderately available but never quite choose them. That is a precise description of the trap, and Groves treats it as the crux of the matter.
This is the argument that gives the video its emotional weight. Groves suggests that by repeatedly choosing people who are not available, we are unconsciously protecting ourselves from availability itself. He lays out the chain of associations that most of us carry without naming: availability equals love, love equals openness, openness equals vulnerability, and vulnerability carries the fear that we might be rejected and abandoned.
"By not choosing available people, we are unconsciously protecting ourselves from availability." (Mark Groves, in the video, around 6:00)
In that light, the unavailable man is not a random misfortune. He is a form of protection, because he keeps the question of rejection at a safe distance. And Groves makes a sharp point about this safety: it is an illusion. You are, he says, living in an experience of rejection anyway. It happens first when you do not share your voice and claim what you want, and second when you stand around someone who is not claiming you. Waiting for a maybe is not the same as being spared the pain of a no.
Groves' guidance is practical, even if the subject is emotional. The video suggests several concrete moves, all of which he presents as options rather than rules.
- Write the list honestly, and include the word "available" twice. He stresses that when you write out what you want in a partner, "available, available" belongs on it. Nice is not enough.
- Look for nice and available. The goal is not to find a replacement for this one man but to recalibrate toward people who can meet you.
- State your interest directly, if you have not. Say what you feel and what you want, and let the answer be real rather than imagined.
- Decide what the friendship is for. If the answer is no, consider whether you can remain close while your feelings are unresolved, or whether stepping back is the honest choice.
- Examine the old script. Ask what it was like to have a caregiver who was present but did not really choose you, and how that might be shaping the vigil.
- Date from choosing, not waiting. Move your power out of the rumination and into decisions you can actually make this week.
The video is short, and it does not promise that a single conversation will end the longing. What it offers is a change of frame: the obsession is less a referendum on the person you cannot have than a clue about the kind of availability you have been avoiding. Once you see that, the question shifts from how to get over someone you never dated to what you are ready to choose for yourself.
