Love is not a Relationship!

FROM A DISCOURSE BY OSHO - Love relates, but it is not a relationship. A relationship is something
finished. A relationship is a noun; the full stop has come, the
honeymoon is over. Now there is no joy, no enthusiasm, now all is
finished. You can carry it on, just to keep your promises. You can
carry it on because it is comfortable, convenient, cozy. You can carry
it on because there is nothing else to do. You can carry it on because
if you disrupt it, it is going to create much trouble for you'
Relationship means something complete, finished, closed.
Love is
never a relationship; love is relating. It is always a river, flowing,
unending. Love knows no full stop; the honeymoon begins but never ends.
It is not like a novel that starts at a certain point and ends at a
certain point. It is an ongoing phenomenon. Lovers end, love continues'"
it is a continuum. It is a verb, not a noun.

And why do we
reduce the beauty of relating to relationship? Why are we in such a
hurry? Because to relate is insecure, and relationship is a security.
Relationship has a certainty; relating is just a meeting of two
strangers, maybe just an overnight stay and in the morning we say
goodbye. Who knows what is going to happen tomorrow? And we are so
afraid that we want to make it certain, we want to make it predictable.
We would like tomorrow to be according to our ideas; we don”t allow it
freedom to have its own say. So we immediately reduce every verb to a
noun.

You are in love with a woman or a man and immediately you
start thinking of getting married. Make it a legal contract. Why? How
does the law come into love? The law comes into love because love is
not there. It is only a fantasy, and you know the fantasy will
disappear. Before it disappears settle down, before it disappears do
something so it becomes impossible to separate.

In a better
world, with more meditative people, with a little more enlightenment
spread over the earth, people will love, love immensely, but their love
will remain a relating not a relationship. And I am not saying that
their love will be only momentary. There is every possibility their
love may go deeper than your love, may have a higher quality of
intimacy, may have something more of poetry and more of godliness in
it. And there is every possibility their love may last longer than your
so-called relationship ever lasts. But it will not be guaranteed by the
law, by the court, by the policeman. The guarantee will be inner. It
will be a commitment from the heart, it will be a silent communion. 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. And there are a few flowers of love which bloom only
after long intimacies. There are seasonal flowers too; within six weeks
they are there, in the sun, but within six weeks again they are gone
forever. There are flowers that take years to come, and there are
flowers that take many years to come. The longer it takes, the deeper
it goes. But it has to be a commitment from one heart to another heart.
It has 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 relationships and
learn how to relate.

Once you are in a relationship you start
taking each other for granted'" that”s what destroys all love affairs.
The woman thinks she knows the man, the man thinks he knows the woman.
Nobody knows either! It is impossible to know the other, the other
remains a mystery. And to take the other for granted is insulting,
disrespectful.To think that you know your wife is very, very
ungrateful. How can you know the woman? How can you know the man? They
are processes, they are not things. The woman that you knew yesterday
is not there today. So much water has gone down the Ganges; she is
somebody else, totally different. Relate again, start again, don”t take
it for granted.And the man that you slept with last night, look at his
face again in the morning. He is no more the same person, so much has
changed. So much, incalculably much has changed. That is the difference
between a thing and a person. The furniture in the room is the same,
but the man and the woman, they are no more the same. Explore again,
start again. That”s what I mean by relating.Relating means you are
always starting, you are continuously 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 his realm of inner feelings,
into the deep recesses of his being. You are trying to unravel a
mystery which cannot be unraveled. That is the joy of love: the
exploration of consciousness. And if you relate, and don”t reduce it to
a relationship, then the other will become a mirror to you. Exploring
him, unawares you will be exploring yourself too. Getting deeper into
the other, knowing his feelings, his thoughts, his deeper stirrings,
you will be knowing your own deeper stirrings too. Lovers become
mirrors to each other, and then love becomes a meditation. Relationship
is ugly, relating is beautiful.Hence I say relate. By saying relate, I
mean 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 you can ever
say, “I have known her,” or, “I have known him.” At the most you can
say, “I have tried my best, but the mystery remains a mystery.”

In fact the more you know, the more mysterious the other becomes. Then love is a constant adventure.