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Question 5

OSHO,

MY BOYFRIEND WANTS TO PICK A FIGHT WITH ME. THAT CONFUSES ME. WHAT CAN I DO ABOUT IT?

Prem Toshi,

IT SIMPLY means he still loves you. The day he stops picking a fight with you, know well that the love affair is finished. It is simply a sign that the love affair still continues. Now, it is difficult to love a woman or a man twenty-four hours a day. You can love for a few minutes, and the rest of the time...? It is perfectly good to pick a fight. Just make it a little more sophisticated. Don't let it be like Astha and Deepak.

Astha is continuously picking fights with her boy friends; she enjoys them. If there is not a fight going on that means there is no excitement. Deepak is a very soft person, but Astha drove him to such a point that he hit her so hard that not only are her lips wounded, her head struck the wall and she had a concussion. Now she is going gaga! This is a love affair, but a little bit primitive!

So, Toshi, there is nothing to be worried about. Why you should be confused? Love is a mad thing in the first place -- it is maddening; if it is not maddening it is not worth it. When you are in a love affair you should know that you have accepted some mad part in you; you have given it recognition. You are following some mad element in you. That's why it is called "falling in love"; otherwise it should be called "rising in love." You don't rise, you fall.

A minister visits the new mental hospital. As the director is leading him around they come to a swimmingpool full of people who are obviously enjoying themselves tremendously. Some are even jumping from a three meter high platform.

"Are these your patients?" the astonished minister asks.

"Oh yes, for sure," exclaims the proud director, "but that's nothing. You should see them when there's water in the pool!"

A love affair is something like a swimmingpool without water: jumping and swimming, and there is no water! It is a mad affair. Because you cannot be alone, you are not sane enough to be alone, you are not centered enough to be alone, hence you need the other. And the other is in the same situation: he needs you, or she needs you, because without the other he is just empty. So two emptinesses trying to fill each other -- is it not mad, utterly mad? How can it be possible?

And then people are different. There are sadists who will torture the woman; unless they torture here they cannot love her. First they will beat her, make her cry, scream; only then they will get excited. Unless they see the woman crying and screaming they don't get excited. Their excitement comes only when the woman starts going crazy.

The word "sadist" comes from the name of a famous novelist, de Sade. He was really an expert. He used to carry a bag like a doctor's bag with all kinds of instruments in it that he had invented to torture women -- all kinds of instruments. And he was a very beautiful man, very rich, and had some charisma. It was impossible not to fall in love with him. Any woman who came in contact with him would soon end up in his torture chamber -- not love chamber. He had a beautiful mansion and his love chamber was a torture chamber. He would lock the door and then he would show all his instruments -- he would open his bag. And on the walls also were many kinds of instrument the woman may never have seen.

But it is said, although the women were tortured, beaten, and blood would start rushing out of their bodies, many women confessed in the court -- because finally he was caught -- they confessed, "Although he tortured us, we had never had such a beautiful orgasmic love with anybody else in our lives." So there are women also who are masochistic.

And the best marriage, the perfect marriage, is between a sadist and a masochist. There are men who are masochists: they want their woman to torture them, to nag them. That brings them a little life -- they become alive.

People are different. When you love a person you should know it. Never try to change the person, because nobody has ever been able to change the person. You can change your lover from A to B, but don't try to change A into something else; that has never been possible. That is a sheer waste of time.

Wilma, Martha and Liza met in the Harlem laundromat and. as usual, the talk soon got around to sex. They began talking about their lovers and the nicknames they had given them.

"I'se calls my man Rolls," began Wilma, "after Rolls Royce, because he starts at the push of a button, never fails to get goin', and moves just so smooth and silent like, why it's just soopreem comfort all the way."

"My man is just like a Ford," said Martha, "maybe one of them old Model T's. Sometimes I'se gotta crank him to get him started, he coughs and backfires a little, but when he gets right on chuggin' away, why, he can go all night without stop."

"Well," said Liza, "I call my man Drambuie."

"Drambuie?" said Martha. "Why now, ain't that some kind of fancy likker?"