Love affairs...

So the only successful love affair is one which remains only in your mind, but never materializes. The great lovers of the world: Laila and Majnu, Romeo and Juliet, Shiri and Farhad, Soni and Mahival -- they are great lovers whose story the world has remembered. But if they had got married, finished; their love story nobody would have ever heard. Because they could not materialize their relationship into actuality, it only remained in their mind. The society and the parents or something came in between, and they had to remain apart, separated. The love remained aflame because it was only in imagination.

In imagination there is no problem. You create your lover the way you want. Now, in your imagination your lover cannot say, "No! I am going to smoke" -- because it is your imagination. If you want him to smoke he will smoke; if you don't want him to smoke, he will not.

But a real husband will smoke even if you say he should not smoke, that it stinks, that if he smokes you cannot sleep with him in the bed. The more you insist, the more he will resist: "Go to hell, sleep anywhere" His cigarette is far more important than you. It is far more significant for him because it gives him support, help, friendship, company -- thousands of things in such a small cigarette. And what can a woman do? So if there is a choice he will choose the cigarette and leave the woman. But in your imagination you can manage whatsoever you want.

And so the man goes on managing the woman: in his imagination she does not perspire, needs no deodorant. In his imagination she never becomes a pain in the neck because imagination cannot go to the neck, imagination remains in the head. And it is just your painting so whatsoever color you want to put there, you go on putting. There is no problem. There is no resistance from the painting like: "I am not going to take this color," or, "I am not going to wear this sari...."

So the only love affairs which are famous in the world are the love affairs which never materialized. All other love affairs... what happened to them? -- nobody bothers about them. In every story, when the lovers get married the last sentence is: "Then they lived happily ever after." It's strange: every lover in every story then lives happily ever after? In fact, after that the real story begins Before that, what was the story was all imagination.



OSHO