Love relates 
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LOVE IS not a relationship. 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 everything is finished.

You can carry it on, just to keep your promises. You can carry it on because it is comfortable, convenient and cosy. 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 like a river, flowing and unending. Love knows no full stops; 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 continuous process. 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 the 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. So it is better to settle down before it disappears. Before it disappears do something so that it becomes impossible to separate.

In a better world, with more like minded 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 that their love may go deeper than your love, may have a higher quality of intimacy, may have something more of poetry and more of god in it. And there is every possibility that their love may last longer than your so-called relationship will. But it will not be guaranteed by the law, by the court, by the policeman.

The guarantee will be from the inner self. It will be a commitment from the heart, it will be a silent communion. If you enjoy being with someone, 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, which take years to come and there are flowers, which take much longer to come. The longer it takes, the deeper it goes.

But it has to be a commitment from one heart to another. It does not even need 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.

It is so ugly seeing people going to churches, temples or the court to get married. It is so ugly, so inhuman. It simply shows that they can’t trust themselves, they trust the policeman or father of the church more than they trust their own inner voice. It shows they can’t trust their love, they trust the law.

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, your friend is very ungrateful. How can you know the woman? How can you know the man? They are processes, not things. The woman that you knew yesterday is not there today. So much water has gone down the mula mutha or the ganges; she is somebody else, totally different. Relate again, start again, don’t take it for granted.

And the man with whom 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 u relate and don’t reduce it to a relationship, then the other will become a mirror to you. By exploring him, 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 process. Relationship is ugly, relating is beautiful.

In a relationship, both persons become blind to each other. Just think, how long has it been since you saw your wife or friend eye to eye? How long has it been since you looked at your husband or friend? May be years. Who looks at one’s own wife? You have already taken it for granted that you know her.

What more is there to look at? You are more interested in strangers than in the people you know -- you know the whole topography of their bodies, you know how they respond, you know everything that has happened is going to happen again and again. It is a repetitive circle.

It is not so, it is not really so. Nothing ever repeats; everything is new every day. Just your eyes become old, your assumptions become old, your mirror gathers dust and you become incapable of reflecting the other.

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.