Osho - Impressions on Love and marriage

Osho’s impressions on Love and marriage

If you love a person, how can you destroy his or her freedom? If you trust a person, you trust her or his freedom too.

One day it happened that a man came to me who was really in a mess, very miserable. And he said, 'I will commit suicide.'
I said, 'Why?'
He said, 'I trusted my wife and she has betrayed me. I had trusted her absolutely and she has been in love with some other man. And I never came to know about it until just now! I have got hold of a few letters. So then I inquired, and then I insisted, and now she has confessed that she has been in love all the time. I will commit suicide' he said.
I said, 'You say you trusted her?'
He said, 'Yes, I trusted her and she betrayed me.'

What do you mean by trust?—some wrong notion about trust; trust also seems to be political.
'You trusted her so that she would not betray you. Your trust was a trick. Now you want to make her feel guilty. This is not trust.'
He was very puzzled. He said, 'What do you mean by trust then, if this is not trust? I trusted her unconditionally.'

I said, 'If I were in your place, trust would mean to me that I trust her freedom, and I trust her intelligence, and I trust her loving capacity. If she falls in love with somebody else, I trust that too. She is intelligent, she can choose. She is free, she can love. I trust her understanding.'

What do you mean by trust? When you trust her intelligence, her understanding, her awareness, you trust it. And if she finds that she would like to move into love with somebody else, it is perfectly okay. Even if you feel pain, that is your problem; it is not her problem. And if you feel pain, that is not because of love, that is because of jealousy.
What kind of trust is this, that you say it has been betrayed? My understanding of trust is that it cannot be betrayed. By its very nature, by its very definition, trust cannot be betrayed. It is impossible to betray trust. If trust can be betrayed, then it is not trust. Think over it.

If I love a woman, I trust her intelligence infinitely. And, if in some moments she wants to be loving to somebody else, it is perfectly good. I have always trusted her intelligence. She must be feeling like that. She is free. She is not my other half, she is independent. And when two persons are independent individuals, only then there is love. Love can flow only between two freedoms.


I have seen couples who have lived together for thirty or forty years; still, they seem to be as immature as they were on their first day together. Still the same complaint: "She doesn't understand what I am saying." Forty years being together and you have not been able to figure out some way that your wife can understand exactly what you are saying, and you can understand exactly what she is saying.

But I think there is no possibility for it to happen except through meditation, because meditation gives you the qualities of silence, awareness, a patient listening, a capacity to put yourself in the other's position.

It is possible with me: I am not concerned with the trivia of your life.
You are here basically to listen and understand.
You are here to grow spiritually.


I was talking to a friend yesterday. There is a conflict between him and his wife. As is natural, he thought if he had married another woman there would not have been this state of affairs. Now this man has no experience of another woman. She exists only in imagination. The wife also feels the same way. She feels she has made a wrong choice. Another man would have made a better husband. In this case also, there is no experience of the other man. He is purely imaginary. 

Now we cannot have the experience of all the women in the world or all the men in the world, therefore, the illusion persists.

I told my friend, "It is not a question of this woman or that woman. It is a question of your different natures. There is conflict in your dispositions. And it is the arrangement between a man and a woman that society has prescribed that is to be blamed for this, for it is an arrangement of ownership. 

Wherever we make permanent relationships, strife is bound to be, for the mind is most impermanent and relationships very permanent.