When a man loves a woman, then he naturally also loves many other people; and when a woman loves a man, then she also loves many other people, because love cannot be limited to a single person. If there is love there at all, it cannot be circumscribed. This is only possible when there is no love.
Love is like breathing. If someone told you, “I only breathe when I am with you, and the rest of the time I don’t breathe”, then you wouldn’t believe him. How could you believe him? He would be dead, if he didn’t breathe without you.
Love is the breath of your soul.
But this is what we have turned it into: for centuries we have made people believe in such stupid ideas and in the process brought so much unhappiness into the world, sown so much jealousy, possessiveness and hatred – for no reason at all! We have programmed this stupid idea into people’s heads that love can only be between two people and therefore must be a dyadic relationship. “True love is a dyadic relationship. When it is not, it is not true love.”
The truth is the exact opposite: when it is a dyadic relationship, it is not true love. In this case, it is not authentic, it is a deception, just an illusion. Then two people are imagining something and are untrue to themselves – not only to their partner, but also to themselves!
How can a man who has a sense of beauty avoid noticing the beauty of women? How can he avoid being interested in them? The only way is to destroy completely his sense of beauty. But then he is not interested any more in his own wife either. This is exactly what has happened: because of this idiotic idea that love must be purely a dyadic relationship, there is no more love on earth. The only possibility is that the husband no longer loves his own wife, since he must kill off the very drive to love. He must suppress every sense of beauty and forget completely that there is such a thing. But then – don’t forget this – he cannot love his own wife any more either – all he can do is pretend. Then he is condemned just to making empty, meaningless gestures.
A woman who is told, “You may only love your own husband and not show any interest in anyone else” necessarily will also lose interest in her own husband.
This is how couples lose interest in one another. They argue all the time. They never stop finding new reasons to fight with each other. But the real reason for their disputes is simply that their life energy is not allowed to unfold.
The truth is simply this: that a man who feels drawn to beauty is interested in many women. A woman who is interested in beauty is interested in all possible men. It may be that she is most interested in just one, maybe so much so that she wants to live together with this one person, but this does not mean that her interest in other people simply disappears: it is still there. However, when you go for a walk together with your husband or your wife, and the man says, “look at that woman, she is really beautiful!”, then there is immediate irritation. How can he say such a thing?! But there is nothing wrong with it. You should be happy, that your husband is normal and alive and that his tyres are not yet worn out. You should be happy, that he is still young and fresh, that he is still receptive to beauty. There is no reason to become jealous.
Osho
(I retranslated this from a German source, if anyone has the original let me know!)