Osho - First Get To Know Each Other

Going on a honeymoon before marriage could put things in perspective, says OSHO

Two people, separately unhappy, create more unhappiness for each other when they come together. That’s mathematical. You were unhappy, your wife was unhappy and you both are hoping that being together you both will become happy? This is such ordinary arithmetic, as two plus two makes four. You both will become unhappy…My suggestion is that marriage should happen after the honeymoon, never before it. If everything goes right, only then should marriage happen. The honeymoon after marriage is very dangerous.

Ninety per cent of marriages are finished by the time the honeymoon is over. But then you are caught, you have no way to escape. Then society, law, courts — everybody is against you if you leave the wife or the wife leaves you. In fact, society should create all barriers possible for marriage and no barrier for divorce. Society should not allow people to marry so easily. The court should create barriers — live together for two years at least; only then the court can allow you to get married. Right now they are doing just the reverse. If you want to get married, nobody asks whether you are ready or whether it is just a whim…. Two people should be allowed to live together long enough to become acquainted, familiar with each other. And even if they want to get married, they should not be allowed to do so until some time has lapsed. Then divorces will disappear from the world.

Divorces happen because marriages are wrong and forced — and because marriages are done in a romantic mood.

A romantic mood is good if you are a poet..., poets are almost always bachelors. They fool around but they never get ‘caught’, and hence their romance remains alive. They go on writing beautiful poetry. One should not get married to a woman or man in a poetic mood. Let the prose mood come, then settle, because day-to-day life is more like prose than like poetry. One should become mature enough. Maturity means that you are no more a romantic fool. You understand life and the responsibilities that go with it as well as understand the possible problems of being together with a person. You accept all those difficulties and yet decide to live with the person.…

When you have become alert to all of these problems and still you decide that it is worthwhile to risk and be with a person rather than to be alone, then get married. Then marriages will never kill love, because this love is realistic. Marriage simply brings out whatsoever is hidden in you...I am not saying that love is destroyed by marriage. Love is destroyed by people who don’t know how to love. Love is destroyed because in the first place love is not. You have been living in a dream. Reality destroys that dream. Otherwise love is something eternal, part of eternity. If you grow, if you know the art, and you accept the realities of love-life, then it goes on growing every day. Marriage becomes a tremendous opportunity to grow into love.

Nothing can destroy love. If it is there, it goes on growing. If love is really love... just being in the presence of the other you feel suddenly happy, just the very presence of the other fulfils something deep in your heart. Something starts singing in your heart, you fall into harmony. Just the very presence of the other helps you be together; you become more individual, centered, grounded. Then it is love.

Love is not a passion, love is not an emotion. Love is a very deep understanding that somebody somehow completes you. Somebody makes you a full circle. The presence of the other enhances your presence. .. it is enough to make you happy... a thousand and one lotuses bloom... then you are in love, and then you can pass through all difficulties that reality creates. And your love, by overcoming them, will become more and more strong.