Introduction
When it comes to relationships, what you’re doing just isn’t working.
You repeat the same frustrating patterns, hitting the same walls again and again. You feel disconnected. You argue about the same old stuff. You keep attracting the same type of person. You can’t seem to find someone who wants what you want and is willing to match your effort. You’re told you’re either too much, not enough, or some combination of both, and no matter how often you said, “I’ll never end up like my parents,” here you are, following tired, recognizable scripts that feel hand-delivered by your mother or father, falling in love with people eerily similar, or desperately trying to avoid any semblance of what their relationship looked like. Life has a funny way of delivering us what we’ve been trying to avoid so that we’ll finally confront it.
Despite past colossal relationship blunders, here you are, still going for it. Day after day you wake up and try to connect with your partner (or at least avoid another argument); or you scroll through dating apps in hopes of finding “the one”; or you post up at bars, having meet-cute after meet-cute with what feels like an endless stream of the same kind of person.
Some may call you crazy, but really, you’re just human—because if there’s one thing that’s true about humans, it’s that humans need one another. And yet, it seems that most don’t have the skills to create the kind of love that everyone is yearning for. No one was modeled how to love—and not just how to love but how to create long-lasting relationships that thrive. Relationships that aren’t just satisfying but also healing and expansive.
It’s not your fault—you were handed a faulty template when it comes to love. If you look at the history of marriage, it was never about love. Not until recently, at least. The skills that were required to keep historical relationships together were just about keeping two strangers from murdering each other for the sake of the family. How romantic! Marriage was about getting more in-laws and expanding land ownership by allying someone in the tribe next door. It was about trade and sharing resources. It was not about love.
No wonder all this is so hard! We’re trying to keep love alive using old-world relationship skills for new-world relationship demands (cue the appropriate quote attributed to Albert Einstein: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”).
We’re individually and collectively standing at a threshold where we must make a choice: stay in our current relationships just the way they are, or mature out of outdated survival patterns, process old emotional debris, and step onto a more meaningful, authentic, and life-nourishing path.
For us, Mark and Kylie—two relationship experts who also happen to be very much in love with each other—we now know the possibility that love can offer when we’re willing to actively choose our relationships and the lessons that emerge within them with curiosity, grace, and humility. Love—when entered into by willing adults committed to transforming themselves—can be the ultimate space of healing and growth. From that place, we are no longer existing in relationships that make us feel imprisoned and that we have to stay in forever to make them work, but rather we are both choosing to be in a relationship that liberates us from our previous patterns and habits that prevented us from creating the type of love, life, family, and partnership we have always desired. A relationship that centers each other’s souls, not fears.
We call it “liberated love” and we’re excited to walk you through how to cultivate it for yourself and with others.
What Is Liberated Love?
Okay, we get it. Liberated love sounds like something you’d hear a couple of “new-agers” talking about at a vegan cafe in Sedona, Arizona. But don’t worry, you don’t need to join an ashram, go on a pilgrimage, eat a bunch of mushrooms, or move to the desert to understand it, embody it, or live it (although you certainly could do that). All you need is you—along with your courageous, curious, and open heart—to show up willing to liberate yourself.
We’re regular people who have a deep passion for understanding relationships and deepening our love not just for each other, but also for the world and all the beings in it.
And we’re here to help you make love blossom. We’re also here to help you learn, as we’ve learned, to walk away when a relationship is no longer serving you. When you’re willing to face your “stuff” and finally let go of old protective behaviors and patterns, you can finally embody and experience the love that everyone dreams of.
But don’t be fooled! This isn’t a book about fairy tales or a guide on how to live out The Notebook (although Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams? Swoon). This is a book focused on using the container of relationship to learn the necessary skills to step fully into your individual and relational potential.
We get that you will be arriving at this journey (and oh boy, is it a journey!) with different hopes, wounds, stories, and scars around love. But no matter how you’re arriving in this moment, it’s likely that you’re ready for a new conversation, depth, and template for relating.
Buckle up. We hear you. And we’re with you.
Love is one of the greatest instruments for expansion and liberation. For both of us, previous relational challenges were wake-up calls that forced us to ask big questions and ultimately put us on this path to liberated love. These big questions included: What’s in the way of my ability to give and receive love? Why can’t I figure this love thing out? Why do I feel like I can never be fully myself in a romantic relationship? Why can’t I fully choose this? Why do I keep finding myself in the same type of relationships, repeating the same patterns?
These questions, and our voyage through relationships, have taken us—individually and together—to the depths of our bodies and souls. We had to get our hands dirty and dig into the deepest corners of our psyche and physiology to get to the root of what’s really going on beneath the surface of our patterns. Trust us. We went deep. Carl Jung would be proud. But it was only when we got to the root of our patterns that we had an opportunity to create a new template. We call this new template “liberated love.”
Spiritual teacher and social psychologist Ram Dass once said, “The highest relationship is one where two people have consciously and intentionally said, ‘Yes, let’s get free and let’s use our relationship with one another as one of the vehicles for doing that. In order to do that, since we know that in freedom is truth, let’s be truthful with one another.’”* This, dear friends, is liberated love.
Now, you might be thinking, “Well, if Mr. Ram Dass is into it, I wanna know more about it! Kylie and Mark, can you explain more about what liberated love is and what it isn’t?”
Gosh, we are so glad you asked.
Here is what liberated love is, and what it isn’t.
Liberated love is:
Being able to access real choice in our relationships. To be free to choose, one must be, well, free—free to stay in a relationship and free to walk away. When we are hooked into familiar patterns, afraid to use our voice, or under duress of any kind, then real choice is not available. It may appear that we can speak up or leave a relationship, but if we are afraid to hurt people or have unexplored and unresolved relational patterns, real choice will feel nearly impossible, and we’ll constantly wonder why we feel stuck. A feeling of “stuckness” is a big ol’ sign that we’re not able to access real choice.Reconnecting to the energy of love and sharing it in ways that serve and honor life. When we’re liberated, our hearts are open (thank you, healthy boundaries!) and we can bring our love and warmth into our relationships and lives.Taking responsibility for your life and how you show up in a relationship. Responsibility is the key to liberation. When we jump back into the driver’s seat of our lives, we return to choice. This sounds like, “I’m responsible for my life, and I get a say in how it goes and what I will and will not allow.” Ah, what a beautiful thing.Devotion to truth. Those who are liberated in love are devoted to being in and sharing the truth. This means when “something is up” we bring it forward. This is a devotion to living transparently.Honoring someone else’s path alongside your own. When someone expresses that they desire to grow or change in a direction that feels as if it’s pulling them away from us, this is an invitation—an invitation to get curious, an invitation to explore our fears and their fears, and an invitation to (re)consider what’s possible for us individually and together. To honor someone’s path is to encourage them to trust the nudges of what they are feeling called to do and explore—no matter how scary or threatening it may feel. The wonderful thing? When we create the space to talk about dreams and possibilities, we allow that for ourselves too. It looks like honoring our own path. Trusting what is trying to move through us is also honoring and freeing another to do the same. Liberation is contagious.Practicing unconditional positive regard for both self and others. This is a big one—and it is the foundation for all liberated relationships. Practicing positive regard simply means respecting and honoring yourself and others without conditions or limits.Liberated love is not:
CodependencyTrying to control others via emotional manipulationGoing along to get alongFeeling like you’re not free to leave if you want to (or feeling like you don’t have a choice regarding being in the relationship)Relying on another human to save you, fix you, or heal youBeing afraid to change or grow away from your partnerTrying to fix, save, or heal anotherDenial of what is really going onContempt for another and/or yourself (treating someone as if they aren’t a powerful, capable, and a whole sovereign being)Verbal, emotional, physical, mental, spiritual, or sexual abuseNow, if you just read the list above and thought, “I’m definitely landing more in the not liberated love camp,” don’t worry, we were the poster children for not liberated. We exhibited a lot—and we mean a lot—of codependency and denial before we embarked on this journey. There is intelligence in our resistance. And yet, love continually invites us to meet our edges over and over again, so that we can transmute what’s in the way of its flow and fate. Or, as thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi says, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”* We’re excited to share a little bit more about the way love cracked us wide open over the course of our relationship journey as well as brought us to a place where we became positively obsessed with liberating others.
Our Story
We dated. We broke up. We matched again on Tinder. Bam. Case closed.
Okay, the Tinder thing didn’t happen.
We originally met through a dating app no one talks about: Instagram. I (Mark) slid right into Kylie’s DMs with something poetic, along the lines of: “Hey! I love your words. Any chance you’d wanna connect beyond the ’gram?”
Copyright © 2024 by Mark Groves and Kylie McBeath
