Osho – Lovers always become friends in the end

[Osho asks a sannyasin about her relationship and she replies: Well, I feel good, and it’s the nicest thing that has happened to me for a very long time. But what’s happening is that he wants me to just be a friend – and I want more than that. He says that he cares about me, but he is not turned on by me…. ]

Osho – Don’t insist for more, just friendship is perfectly good. There are two possibilities for every human being. One is that you fall in love, and by and by friendship grows out of that. Lovers always become friends in the end – and if they cannot, then somewhere they have missed and something has gone wrong – because by and by the passion settles.

Passion is a very very excited state of mind which you cannot live in for very long. By the time the honeymoon is over, so is the passion. Then friendship arises. So this is one possibility – that two people fall in love. There is tremendous passion; they are almost in a cyclone, lost. They move at the peaks, they have completely forgotten the valleys for a few days.

But nobody can live at the peak; at the most you can be there for a holiday. One settles in the valley. So by and by a love relationship settles and becomes calm and tranquil and harmonious – then friendship arises. Husband and wife become like brother and sister. But there are problems, because once the fever has gone, the woman starts thinking that the man doesn’t love her enough now, and the man thinks the same of the woman.

But the other possibility is that you start as friends, without any passion. The trouble will be that the mind will be asking for passion in the beginning. If you can drop that and not be worried about it, you can grow in friendship, so that by and by without any passion or peak you will come to the valley and settle in it.

And my feeling is that if love starts by friendship, though it may be difficult in the beginning, in the end it is very very beautiful, because you never miss anything. If from the beginning a friendship can remain a friendship, it will go deeper; it will not go higher, but it will go deeper and will settle. This type of relationship is difficult in the beginning, and the other type is easy to begin with, but difficult in the end. In fact if you look at the whole, both are the same. So don’t make it a problem, or [your boyfriend] will start escaping!

Source: from Osho Book “Hammer on The Rock”