In matters of love and relationships, Osho's teachings challenge nearly every conventional belief we hold dear. His vision of love is revolutionary, threatening to societal norms, and profoundly liberating for those ready to embrace it. Rather than seeing love as possession, duty, or sacrifice, Osho presents it as the highest form of freedom.
Love Is Not a Need
The foundation of Osho's philosophy on love begins with a startling assertion: if you need someone, you cannot truly love them. Need creates dependence, and dependence breeds fear, jealousy, and control. When you need someone, you're actually using them to fill an inner emptiness, to make yourself feel complete.
Real love, according to Osho, flows from wholeness, not emptiness. It's an overflow of your own fulfillment, a gift you give because you have so much that it naturally spills out. This transforms the entire dynamic of relationships from getting to giving, from desperation to celebration.
The Myth of "The One"
Society teaches us to search for "the one"—that perfect person who will complete us, make us whole, and fulfill all our needs. Osho calls this romantic conditioning a beautiful lie that creates endless suffering.
There is no "the one" because you are already one, already whole. When you understand this, relationships shift from being about finding completion to sharing wholeness. You don't come together because you're incomplete; you come together to share your completeness and celebrate existence together.
This doesn't mean you won't have preferences or attractions, but these come from joy rather than need. You're drawn to someone not because they fill a gap but because sharing with them enhances the celebration of life.
Freedom as the Foundation
Perhaps Osho's most controversial teaching on relationships is that freedom must be the foundation, not love itself. Conventional wisdom says love is the foundation, and if you truly love someone, you'll naturally give them freedom. Osho reverses this: make freedom the foundation, and love will flower naturally.
When you give your partner complete freedom—freedom to be themselves, freedom to grow, freedom even to leave—you create the space in which love can thrive. Conversely, when you try to possess, control, or chain someone, you kill the very love you're trying to preserve.
This requires immense courage and trust. It means accepting that your partner stays with you not because they're bound by obligation, fear, or need, but because they choose to, moment to moment. This choice, made freely and repeatedly, is far more meaningful than any promise or vow.
Jealousy: The Enemy of Love
For Osho, jealousy is not a sign of love but its opposite. Jealousy grows from possessiveness, insecurity, and the fear of loss. It treats your partner as property rather than a person, as something you own rather than someone you love.
The antidote to jealousy isn't suppression but awareness. By watching jealousy arise without acting on it, by understanding its roots in your own insecurity and conditioning, you begin to free yourself from its grip. You realize that your partner's freedom doesn't threaten your relationship—it enriches it.
Osho suggests that if your partner finds joy with someone else, you should be happy for them. Their happiness shouldn't depend on excluding everyone else, just as their love for you doesn't diminish their love for friends, family, or the world. Love isn't a limited commodity that must be rationed.
The Danger of Commitment
Traditional relationships are built on commitments and promises that stretch into an indefinite future. You promise to love someone forever, through all circumstances, regardless of how either of you changes. Osho sees this as not only unrealistic but harmful.
You cannot promise how you'll feel tomorrow because you cannot control the future. What you can do is be totally present today, loving fully in this moment without using the future as security. When tomorrow comes, you can be present then too, choosing your partner again—or honestly acknowledging if the love has faded.
This might seem to undermine relationship stability, but Osho argues it creates genuine stability. Relationships stay alive not through the dead weight of old promises but through continuous choice and renewal. Each day you choose each other is a day your relationship is truly alive.
Love and Meditation
For Osho, the deepest love relationships are those between two meditators—two people who have found their own inner completeness and can meet as two whole beings rather than two halves seeking completion.
When both partners are on a journey of self-discovery and inner growth, the relationship becomes a mirror, revealing your unconscious patterns, your ego games, your defensive mechanisms. Rather than running from this discomfort, you can use it as fuel for transformation.
A conscious relationship becomes a spiritual practice where you help each other wake up. You're not just lovers or partners but fellow travelers on the journey to consciousness, celebrating each other's growth even when it takes you in different directions.
Beyond Monogamy and Polygamy
Osho doesn't prescribe monogamy or advocate for polygamy. Instead, he suggests that each person must discover what's authentic for them, free from society's conditioning. For some, exclusive partnership is a natural expression of their being. For others, it's a prison.
The key is honesty—with yourself and your partner. If you pretend to be monogamous while harboring desires for others, you create inner conflict and relationship dysfunction. If you pretend to be okay with openness when you actually crave exclusivity, you betray yourself.
There's no right answer that applies to everyone. What matters is living your truth consciously rather than unconsciously following social norms or rebelling against them.
The Ultimate Teaching
Osho's ultimate teaching on love is that it must lead to meditation, to an aloneness that is not loneliness. You learn to love deeply while remaining centered in yourself, to be intimate while maintaining your independence, to merge completely while never losing your individuality.
This paradox—being together and alone simultaneously—is the highest form of relationship. You're neither dependent nor independent but interdependent, neither bound nor separate but dancing freely in the space between.
Conclusion
Osho's vision of love and relationships isn't for everyone, nor did he claim it should be. It requires a level of consciousness, courage, and commitment to truth that many find too demanding. It asks you to question everything you've been taught about love and to discover your own authentic way of relating.
But for those who embrace it, this path offers a possibility society rarely acknowledges: that love can be both deep and free, passionate and peaceful, intimate and independent. That you can love totally without losing yourself, give completely without creating debt, and be in relationship while remaining whole.
This is love as liberation rather than bondage, as celebration rather than sacrifice, as consciousness rather than unconscious habit. It's love in its highest form—a flowering of two individual freedoms rather than a fusion of two dependencies.