mysql join table on condition that compares two records - mysql

Question

I am trying to create a left join with an on statement that has requirements in two records. Essentially, i am trying to determine if two users are members of a group via a groupId and userId
This is where I started
LEFT JOIN groups AS g1 ON g1.status = "active" AND g1.userId = "user1"
LEFT JOIN groups AS g2 ON g2.status = "active" AND g1.groupId = g2.groupId AND g2.userId = "user2"
The problem with the two the joins is that the first join is going to select the first available record that meets this condition. The second join will be generated from the first join due to the groupId. This may work if the groupId for the second is the same. However, this is not the case as users can be members of a bunch of different groups. Essentially, I am trying to create a join statements that attempts to find a similar group (via groupId) between the two users. If the group is not there is just returns null (reason for me using left join).
How can I create a join that compares a similar groupId between two records?
Thanks
Here is the entire query
SELECT u*, code.description AS statusText...., CASE WHEN u.id = "ME" THEN 1 ELSE g2.groupId END AS public
FROM users AS u
LEFT JOIN codes AS code ON code.code = u.status
LEFT JOIN groups AS g1 ON g1.status = "active" AND g1.userId = u.id
LEFT JOIN groups AS g2 ON g2.status = "active" AND g1.groupId = g2.groupId AND g2.userId = "ME"
WHERE u.id = :u
LIMIT 1
Where ME equals your user login and :u is the user we are looking up
Essentially, i am trying to compare if you and another user a part of the same group.
Results would look like an array with the following details
[userId] => 1
[date] => 2015-06-16 00:00:00
[player] => first name
[email] => email
....
[public] => 1 <- this is the important variable i am trying to get. I want to return a number that i will treat as a boolean. The number tells me that i have a group in common with the user i am looking up
The group table
| userId | groupId | colum1 | ... |
+--------+---------+--------+------+
| 1 | 1 | 1 | ALL |
+--------+---------+--------+------+
| 1 | 5 | 1 | NONE |
+--------+---------+--------+------+
| 6 | 1 | 1 | ALL |
+--------+---------+--------+------+
| 2 | 3 | 1 | NONE |
+--------+---------+--------+------+
From this example of the table data you can see that users 1 and users 6 are part of the same group. If this was the only data in the table than my join statement would work. However, this is not the case and if user 1 and ME were both part of group 5 my statement would fail
I would prefer not to use a subquery