Mark Groves' nine-and-a-half-minute video on why we can't let go of an ex is less a how-to than a confrontation. Filmed in a single fired-up take, it argues that the pull toward a past partner who treated us badly is rarely about that person at all. It is about a part of us that believes we are incomplete without someone else's choice, a part that will tolerate almost anything to avoid the discomfort of being alone. Groves frames the way out as a sequence: stop denying what is true, let the needy part of yourself die, refuse to abandon yourself to win someone's approval, and recognize that the entire problem keeps coming back to one place. As he puts it near the end, "It's always us." What follows unpacks the ideas in that monologue, because they reach well beyond one breakup.
Groves opens by describing a specific behavior: reaching out to exes or past partners when the relationship has clearly ended, and the ending was not kind. His framing is blunt. The question is not whether we miss someone, but whether we are willing to see plainly what happened. "Let's just get straight truth here," he says at the top of the video, and he treats honest acknowledgment as the starting point for everything else.
The reason this matters, in his telling, is that we often want a different story than the one that actually occurred. We replay the relationship looking for the version in which the other person was sorry, or wanted us back, or simply didn't mean the harm. That wish is understandable. It also becomes the trap. Each message sent to an ex who has already shown who they are is an attempt to rewrite a reality that has already been delivered.
The most striking claim in the video comes at the 0:43 mark: "The moment you deny what is real, you have to separate from yourself." Groves is not talking about a metaphor. His argument is that when we insist a relationship is working while our own experience says it is not, we have to override our perceptions. The cost is a loss of self-trust. Your body and your judgment are telling you one thing, and your behavior is saying another.
He describes what that split feels like in ordinary language: "I feel like I'm crazy." Groves's reply is that the feeling is accurate. Living in a world where the truth is no longer allowed, he suggests, is genuinely disorienting, because you are forced to doubt the signals you most need to trust. This is why he treats the question as bigger than romance. "Do you see how important this is?" he asks, "because you have to see how this affects all of your life."
This is where the video turns more generous. Groves says that he still thinks about a girlfriend from grade nine, remembers the song they had, and feels sad about it, but also feels real gratitude. Her role, he says, is part of what shaped his sense of a partner. "Our relationships, both bad and good, create the archetype of our ideal partner," he says. "We have to experience what we don't want to know what we do want."
The point is important because it gives a reason for the past without endorsing the behavior that keeps you attached to it. Every relationship teaches something about what you will and will not accept. You can honor that lesson, and feel affection for the person who taught it, without needing them to re-enter your life. Groves is clear that the goal is not to erase past partners from memory. It is to stop treating them as the place where your wholeness lives.
Here Groves reaches for the image that gives the video its title-level promise. When we refuse to reach out to someone who was bad for us, he says, "the part of us that needs someone else in order to feel complete dies." He admits this will feel like something dying, because it is. It is the part that needs another person to complete your story, the part that needs to be chosen before you believe you are lovable.
The death, in his framing, is also a birth. Refusing the old pattern gives rise to what he calls "an integrated, whole version of yourself." At 2:56 he describes the moment as one where you say, in effect, that you matter more than the painful feelings that drove your past decisions. He is candid that this is unfamiliar ground. "It will be unfamiliar because it's scary and uncertain," he says. And he names the reason we return to the familiar anyway: "We will be with someone who's not good for us because we're so terrified of being alone."
For a reader working through this, the practical implication is the discomfort itself. Groves says you will feel "a little incomplete for a bit," and he asks you to read that feeling as the transition rather than as evidence you made a mistake.
At 4:49 Groves draws a line that is easy to miss and important to hold. Feeling complete on your own, he says, is not the same as refusing other people. "You are allowed to need and depend on other people," he says. The problem is narrower: "you should never depend on someone for how you feel about yourself. You should never give away your self-worth to someone else."
He takes aim at the cultural shorthand of independence, the anthem-level version of self-sufficiency in which needing anyone is weakness. Groves thinks that posture can be its own disguise. Someone performing total independence may still be organizing their identity around another person's verdict. The test he proposes is simple, and he offers it as a question to ask yourself in the moment: "Is choosing them choosing me? Am I choosing myself right now? Is being in this relationship abandoning myself?"
Groves calls this "the mind [thing] of all of this," and the reasoning is worth following. We do most of these things, he argues, because we fear rejection, abandonment, and not being enough. Yet the strategies we use to avoid those outcomes are the very behaviors that produce them internally. "Isn't this crazy that in order to not get rejected or abandoned, we reject and abandon ourselves?" he asks.
His conclusion is that the moment we begin pretending to be someone else in order to be chosen, we have already lost. The win would be hollow because the person chosen is not the person you actually are. Groves says that self-abandonment is the thing to watch for, because it is the mechanism that makes every relationship feel precarious.
Groves finishes the core argument with a short anthropological detour. He says humans are shaped to adapt to the people around them, to take on their beliefs and thoughts in order to belong, and that religion is a familiar example: you are born into a faith before you ever choose one, if you choose one at all. Families and cultures teach that love is conditional on fitting in. "I need you to love me in order to be safe in this tribe," he says, describing the internal logic that children and adults alike absorb.
The shift he recommends is from reacting to the world toward letting the world respond to you. At 8:05 he says, "This is who I am. This is my voice. These are my opinions. These are my boundaries." Then he makes the claim that most people hear as the video's thesis: when you stop trying to become whatever fits, "my people will line up around me." He also describes the everyday version of this pattern. If someone says they do not want a relationship, we tell ourselves we will not want one either, even when we do. Groves's warning is that selling out your values, integrity, or wants in order to secure someone else's attention "never lasts."
Taken together, his argument is that the ex is almost a stand-in. The real relationship is the one each person has with their own voice, boundaries, and sense of worth. An ex who left, cheated, or mistreated you is a vivid place where that relationship can be tested, which is why the grip can feel so strong.
Groves' video is short, unpolished, and deliberately emotional, and it gives no step-by-step program. What it offers is a set of questions to carry into a hard moment. Before you reach out to someone who hurt you, ask whether you are choosing yourself or abandoning yourself. Before you rewrite the story of a relationship, ask whether you are denying what is real. Before you decide you need someone to feel whole, ask whether you can need them without depending on them for your sense of worth.
Watch the full video if you want his voice and his cadence, which carry as much of the argument as the words. Notice what it stirs up. Groves himself frames the discomfort of this work as the sign it is working, and the closing line of the transcript is a reminder that the relationship you most need to repair is the one with yourself: "It's always us."
