Marriage is a hell, but sometimes people need it. What to do? So I have to tell them to get into marriage. They need to pass through the hell of it, and they cannot understand the hell of it unless they pass through it. I am not saying that in marriage love cannot grow; it can grow, but there is no necessity for it. I am not saying that in love marriage cannot grow; it can grow, but there is no necessity, no logical necessity in it.
It is a way to avoid difficulties, but whenever you avoid difficulties and challenges you have avoided growth also. Married people never grow. Lovers grow, because they have to meet the challenge every moment - and with no security. They have to create an inner phenomenon. With security you need not bother to create anything; the society helps.
Marriage is more permanent than love. Love may be eternal, but it is not permanent. It may continue forever and forever, but there is no inner necessity for it to continue. It is like a flower: bloomed in the morning, by the evening gone. It is not like the rock. Marriage is more permanent; you can rely on it. In old age it will be helpful.
Man has to create marriage because man is afraid of the unknown. On all levels of life and existence, man has created substitutes: for love there is marriage; for real religion there are sects - they are like marriages. Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Christianity, Jainism - they are not real religion. Real religion has no name; it is like love. But because love is dangerous and you are so afraid of the future, you would like to have some security. You believe more in insurance companies than in life. That's why you have created marriage.
Marriage is very secure. It is safe. There is no growth in it. One is simply stuck. Marriage is a sexual arrangement; intimacy is a search for love. Marriage is a sort of prostitution, a permanent sort. One has got married to a woman or to a man - it is a permanent prostitution. The arrangement is economical, not psychological, not of the heart.
Marriage is an effort to legalize love. It is out of fear. It is thinking about the future, about the tomorrows. Man always thinks of the past and the future, and because of this constant thinking about past and future, he destroys the present. And the present is the only reality there is. One has to live in the present. The past has to die and has to be allowed to die.
It is impossible! It has never happened - it cannot happen in the very nature of things. Marriage is something against nature. Marriage is an imposition, an invention of man - certainly out of necessity, but now even that necessity is out of date. It was a necessary evil in the past, but now it can be dropped. And it should be dropped: man has suffered enough for it, more than enough. It is an ugly institution for the simple reason that love cannot be legalized. Love and law are contradictory phenomena.
We have forced everyone to go into marriage because of love. Because you cannot love outside it, so we have unnecessarily forced love and marriage to be together - unnecessarily. Marriage is for deeper things - even more deep: for intimacy, for a "co-inherence," to work on something which cannot be done alone, which can be done together, which needs a togetherness, a deep togetherness. Because of this love-starved society, we fall into marriage out of romantic love.
I am not against marriage - without marriage, ninety-nine percent jokes will disappear from the world. How I can be against marriage? I am all for it.
Without marriage there will be no renunciation, Buddha would not have left the world - for what? His wife, Yashodhara, must have created the situation - Mahavira would not have escaped to the mountains. Without marriage there would have been no Buddha, no Mahavira. Just think: the history would have been very flat, without any salt, tasteless. Marriage keeps this whole "sorry-go-round" on and on. People call it "merry-go-round".
Religion exists not because of God or for God; it is because of marriage. Marriage creates so much misery that one has to meditate; meditation is a byproduct. Without marriage, who will bother to meditate? For what? You will be already blissful!
The first thing is love: love deeply. If you have been with a person for a few years, in deep love, and you have experienced all the joys and all the miseries, and still you decide to be with the person, then marriage is okay. Because marriage is only a legal arrangement, it cannot make anything more beautiful than it is. It can only make it ugly, it cannot beautify it. Once it is settled legally, once you start taking each other for granted, things will start going down rather than rising high.
Marriage is a totally different phenomenon: it is the climax of love. Then it is good. I am not against marriage - I am for the REAL marriage. I am against the false, the pseudo, that exists. But it is an arrangement. It gives you a certain security, safety, occupation. It keeps you engaged. Otherwise, it gives you no enrichment, it gives you no nourishment.
Marriage is a formality, a legal bondage. Love is of the heart; marriage is of the mind. That's why I am never in favor of marriage.
One should marry only when one is wise enough. Marriage is not for young people. For young people is to fool around. Marriage is for those who have experienced life in many ways, who have seen all the colors, the whole spectrum of it, and are now ready to settle.
Marriage exists as an institution of exploitation, it is not togetherness. That is why no happiness comes out of it as a flowering. It cannot. Out of the roots of exploitation how can ecstasy be born?
People are falling in love because a certain man has a certain type of nose. People are falling in love with fragments! Nobody is bothered about the totality of the person -- and it is a vast thing. The nose does not count for much --- after two days you won't look at it at all. Or the color, or the shape, or the proportion of the body -- all these things are very minor. The real thing is the total functioning of the person, and that can be experienced only when you live together.
You have not looked at the poor woman for years, for the simple reason that marriage makes things so certain. Marriage makes things so dead and dull. Marriage takes all surprise and wonder away. Marriage makes you take your wife for granted, your husband for granted. What is the need to look at your wife? She will be there tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and forever. You look at people when you know you may not be able to look at them again. Marriage kills; it makes something tremendously beautiful very ugly.
Love, and love as deeply as possible. And if love itself becomes the marriage, that is another thing, altogether different. If love itself becomes such an intimacy that it is unbreakable, that is another thing, that is not a legal sanction. Legal sanctions are needed only because you are afraid. You know that your love is not enough; you need the legal support for it. You know perfectly well that you can escape or the woman can escape, hence you need the policeman to keep you together. But this is ugly, to need a policeman to keep you together. That's what marriage is!
I have never said that love is destroyed by marriage. How can marriage destroy love? Yes, it is destroyed in marriage, but it is destroyed by you, not by marriage. It is destroyed by the partners. How can marriage destroy love? It is you who destroy it, because you don't know what love is. You simply pretend to know, you simply hope that you know, you dream that you know, but you don't know what love is. Love has to be learned; it is the greatest art there is.
It may be just one facet of your personality, or it may not even be a facet but only a pretension. You can show this false face with no problem when sometimes you meet on a sea beach, sometimes in a garden, sometimes under the moon and the stars, but when you really start living together then the reality starts surfacing. The real person is a hell and all that sweet talk that had happened under the stars becomes just lies.
Man is less interested in marriage, very much less interested. In fact not interested at all. If he agrees, he agrees only reluctantly - because marriage means responsibility. Marriage means bondage, marriage means now you are imprisoned. Now you are no more free to move with other women. For a man, marriage looks like a prison. For a woman, marriage looks like safety, security, a home. For a woman marriage means home, and for a man marriage means slavery. Total different beliefs, so they act differently. Conflicting beliefs.
That's the thing about marriage. It's a shell game we play with ourselves. We're the suckers and we have to lose, but we play anyway because we lie to ourselves that we can win.
As we all know from witnessing the consuming jealousy of husbands who are never faithful, people do not confine themselves to the emotions to which they are entitled.
What is yours is mine, and all mine is yours.
