Your Disgust

Relating Is Beautiful

Relating Is Beautiful, Relationships Are Not:

A 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.

Why do we reduce the beauty of relating to a relationship? Why are we in such a hurry? Because to relate is insecure, and a relationship is security, a relationship has 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.

Relating means you are always starting, you are always trying to become acquainted. Again and again, you are introducing yourself to each other.

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

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 his realm of inner feelings, into the deep recesses of her being. You are trying to unravel a mystery which cannot be unravelled.

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 the other, 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.

Relationships are ugly, relating is beautiful.