Relating
The first step of love is relationship, the second state of love is relating -- and there is a vast difference between the two. In relationship you exclude everybody, you focus on one person. It is a kind of concentration of the heart. But all concentration becomes a concentration camp! (laughter) Basically it is fascist. To begin with it is okay but one should not start living there, in a concentration camp. [....]
So love also starts as a concentration camp -- a one-to-one affair, exclusive. Both are prisoners and both are the gaolers; they function in both ways.
Each is imprisoned by the other and each is a gaoler in his own right. It is a beautiful game! But one should not remain there, otherwise life is wasted. One should learn the lesson, the beauty of it, the ugliness of it -- both have to be learned. And the ugliness is to be dropped and the beauty has to be preserved.
That's what relating is: you drop all that is ugly in love -- possessiveness, exclusiveness, domination, suspicion, doubt, every effort to curtail the other's freedom. When all these are dropped and your love becomes just a relating, not a relationship, closer to friendship.... You can have many friends, you can also have many lovers -- and one should start growing from one to many, but that too is not the goal.
The third state is when love is just a quality. You are not attached to one or to many: love is just like breathing -- it is your nature -- so to whosoever come in contact with you are loving. This is the third stage: very few have attained to the third. And there is a fourth state which only so few people have attained that they can be counted on fingers.
The fourth is when your very being is love -- it is not a quality, your very existence is love. You have forgotten all about love. Because you yourself are love there is no need to remember it; now you act out of it, simply, naturally, spontaneously. At that fourth point one is surrendered to existence.
-Osho, "Is the Grass Really Greener...?, #30"