I did this to Kai. When we first started dating, I was resolving my avoidance and fear of closeness.

She was expressing something exciting about the future, like, oh, I can't wait to travel here or visit this with you.

And I was like, let's get to the third day first. And I could tell I totally took the air out of our relationship tires.

I took the momentum out in that moment moment and I could tell what I was doing

was trying to protect myself from being too excited about her and protect her from having too

much excitement about me because I might let her down or I might hurt her or whatever it might be.

And I immediately...

Hi, my name is Mark Groves and I'm obsessed with understanding human behavior and why we do what we do.

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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mark Rose podcast. This is a solo episode coming at

you and it's by special request. My friend Kelsey sent me this TikTok video. And she was like, listen, this type of behavior is rampant in the dating world. And it's rampant in my dating life. Can you speak to it? And so we had a little back and forth. And I was like, all right, I'm going to do a podcast episode on this. If it's something that, well, listen, I know it's something that is rampant in the world of relating. It doesn't just have to be dating. We're going to talk a little bit about why this is true. So let me first just read off what is expressed in the TikTok video. Now, it's this woman sitting with her hands back, kind of like, you know, like

tired of the dating world. And in it, there's text that goes over top and it says, when you

caught feelings yesterday because he was giving boyfriend vibes and calling you baby, but now he

doesn't want to talk today. If you're listening to this, maybe you're the person who has had

that where someone

goes hot, cold. They're acting like a boyfriend, a girlfriend, a partner, right? And it doesn't matter

the gender. This can be our experience of the people we're dating. You know, and they get the act like

were they're number one. They're speaking to the future. And then all of a sudden, cold. Maybe they

ghost. Maybe they distance, right? In the language of relating,

they call things distancing tactics, things that we do and say that creates space when the

closeness becomes too overwhelming for our system. So in attachment theory, we would think of

...