What is love anyway?

 I like these words 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 on with it, just to keep your promises. To do so is comfortable, convenient, and cosy. Perhaps you do it because there is nothing else to do. Perhaps you think that if you disrupt it, it is going to create much trouble for you… Relationship means something complete, finished, and 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 a novel that starts at a certain point and ends at a certain point. It is ongoing. Lovers end, love continues. It’s a continuum. It’s a verb, not a noun.

And why do we reduce the beauty of relating to relationship? Because to relate is insecure, and relationship is a security. Relationship has a certainty; relating is just a meeting of two strangers, maybe in the morning we say goodbye. Who knows what the morrow brings? We would like tomorrow to be according to our ideas; so we reduce verbs to nouns.

You are in love and immediately you start thinking of getting married. Make it a legal contract. The law comes
into love because love is not there. It is only a fantasy, and you know the fantasy will disappear.

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 that bloom only after long intimacies. There are seasonal flowers too: within six weeks they are there, in the sun, but another six weeks and they are gone forever. There are flowers that take years to come… The longer it takes, the deeper it goes. But it has to be a commitment from one heart to another. It has not even to be verbalised, because to verbalise 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.

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 unravel a mystery that cannot be unravelled. That is the joy of love: the exploration of consciousness.

Excerpted from Love, Freedom, and Aloneness:
A New Vision of Relating. Courtesy:
Osho International Foundation/www.osho.com


                                                   ***