on aloneness

What hurts relationships is the idea that there is someone responsible for you and that you are responsible for someone. While the practical side may work out (i.e. an agreement that one provides outside the home and the other inside the home) it does not work on the emotional side (i.e. NOT you take care of me and I give up that responsibility to myself and vice versa).

What's difficult is that at the start of the relationship you WANT to be responsible for someone, want to bear gifts, shower them with love, want to be important in their lives. And so you take on some responsibility out of a generosity that overtakes you (being in love).

And that makes the person happy and you give more.

But there needs to always be the distinction that while you give and they receive you are not responsible for their needs or their joy. They are responsible, and they may, out of that responsibility to find contentment, decide to be with you because that is where they feel safest and where their needs are met.

But they should not - I repeat NOT - hand that responsibility over to you because you are able to meet it or because it fits the job description of a role you've taken on (e.g. spouse).

It is not about being so self sufficient you decide to be alone. It is about letting go with them to let those needs be shared (vulnerability) and be met (trust) while holding onto the responsibility for yourself and leaving the responsibility for them with them. The rest will come.

From Osho:

The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person - without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.