* Love is never a relationship, it is…

Love is not about relationship it is about relating.

A relationship is a noun; it means something has finished, completed and closed; the full stop has come; the honeymoon is over. There is no joy, no enthusiasm. We can carry it on, just to keep our promises; or we can carry on because it is comfortable, convenient, cozy or because there is nothing else to do, and if we disrupt it, it is going to create much trouble for us.

Love is a verb, and is never a relationship; love is relating. It is like a river – flowing, unending. Love has no full stop; it is a continuum and is an ongoing phenomenon.

Why do we reduce the beauty of relating to relationship? And why are we in such a hurry to reduce it? Osho believes that it is because to relate is insecure; whereas relationship is a security, and it has certainty. Relating is just a meeting of two strangers; and nobody knows what is going to happen tomorrow. We are afraid of uncertainty, hence we want to make it predictable; we would like tomorrow to be according to our ideas, and we do not want our freedom to have its own say, therefore we immediately reduce every verb to a noun.

This is exactly what happens to our love. When we are in love, we will start to think of getting married immediately, and making it a legal contract. Why is that so? Ever wonder how does the law come into love? The law comes into love because the love is not there. It is just a fantasy, and we know that fantasy will disappear; so before it disappear, settle it down quickly, and do something to it so that it becomes impossible to separate.

If you enjoy being with somebody, you would like to enjoy it more and more. If you enjoy the intimacy, you would like to explore the intimacy more and more. There are flowers that take years to bloom, and there are flowers that keep blooming for many years to come. The longer it takes, the deeper it goes.

Love has to be a commitment from one heart to another heart. It should not even to be verbalized, because to verbalize, it is to profane it. It has to be a silent commitment, eye to eye, heart to heart, being to being. It has to be understood, not said.

Forget relationship and learn how to relate. Once we are in relationship, we start taking each other for granted. That’s what destroys all love affairs. The women thinks she knows the man, the man thinks he knows the woman. Nobody knows (actually)! It is impossible to know the other; the other remains a mystery. And to take the other for granted is insulting and disrespectful.

To think that we know our partner is very ungrateful. How can you know the woman? How can you know the man? They are processes; they are not things. The woman that we knew yesterday is not there today. So much water has gone down the Ganges; she is somebody else, totally different from yesterday. That is the different between a thing and a person. The furniture in the room is the same every day; but the man and the woman they are not the same everyday. Hence relate again; start again. And don’t take it for granted.

Relating means you are always starting, you are always trying to become acquainted. Again and again, you are introducing yourself to each other. You are trying to see the many facets of the other’s personality. You are trying to penetrate deeper and deeper into the realm of his/her inner feelings, into the deeper recesses of his/her being. You are trying to unravel a mystery that cannot be unraveled.

That is the joy of love: “the exploration of consciousness”.

If we relate, and don’t reduce it to a relationship, then the other will become a mirror to us. When we’re exploring the other, unknowingly (and unawares that) we are exploring ourselves too. Getting deeper into the other, knowing his/her feelings, his/her thoughts, his/her deeper stirrings, and we will get to know our own deeper stirring too. Lovers become mirrors to each other, and then love becomes a meditation.

Relationship is ugly; relating is beautiful. In relationship both persons become blind to each other.

Hence Osho says relate. By saying relate, he means remain continuously on a honeymoon. Go on searching and seeking each other; finding new ways of loving each other; finding new ways of being with each other. And each person is such an infinite mystery, inexhaustible, unfathomable, that it is not possible that we can ever say, “I have known her.” Or “I have known him.” At the most we can say is “I have tried my best, but the mystery remains a mystery.” In fact the more we know the more mysterious the other becomes. Love is a constant adventure.

Love should be a reality in our life, not just a poem, nor a dream. It has to be actualized. It is never too late to experience love for the first time.

Learn to love. Very few people know how to love. We all know that love is needed; we all know that without love life is meaningless, but we don’t know how to love. And whatsoever we do in the name of love is not love; it is always something else. It is a mixture of so many things; jealousy, anger, hatred, possessiveness, domination, and ego. All these poisons destroy the very nectar. To love means to get rid of all these poisons and then slowly we will see a new quality of love arising in us.

Love cannot be learned; it cannot be cultivated. The cultivated love will not be love at all. It will not be a real rose; it will be a plastic flower. When we learn something, it means something comes from the outside; it is not an inner growth. And love has to be our inner growth if it is to be authentic and real.

Love is not a learning but a growth. What is needed on our part is not to learn the ways of love but to unlearn the ways of un-love. Love is our natural spontaneous being. The spring of love is always there – hidden behind those rocks; it is our very being. Once those obstacles are removed and the rocks thrown out of the ways, the flow of love starts.

For further reading, refer to “being in love: how to love with awareness and relate without fear” by OSHO.

Advertisement