What is the relationship between love and friendship?
Friendship is the purest love.
It is the highest form of love where nothing is asked for, no condition, where one simply enjoys giving. One gets much -- but that is secondary, and that happens of its own accord. Friendship is something immensely valuable. Love tends to be possessive; friendship is non-possessive love. Friendship is all that is good in love minus that which is not good. Friendship is the very essential core of love. To rise to friendship is really a great spiritual growth. People fall in love, and people rise in friendship. And whenever a love relationship becomes a friendship it is a rare, beautiful phenomenon, it is unique. It is very difficult....
A love relationship is a love/hate relationship; either it is love or it is hate. It is immediately hate, the hate is very close by. Love simply moves between love and hate. It is like a pendulum going from left to right and from right to left, and lovers are continuously moving from love to hate, from hate to love. That is the misery of lovers.
Friendship is a more tranquil affair, as if the pendulum has stopped in the middle, it is moving no more. Real love becomes friendship, has to become. If it doesn't, something unreal, pseudo, phony, is still there. Real love soars high; it becomes non-possessive. And unless it becomes non-possessive it has no spiritual quality in it; it is earthy. It is more or less a physical phenomenon, a physical attraction, nothing more than that... no spiritual communion. Friendship is spiritual communion.
So remember that all love has to be transformed into friendship. And friendship is very inclusive; it can include the whole. Love is narrow; friendship is a wide sky. You can have as many friends as you want. You cannot have as many lovers, unless your love has become friendship; unless love is also friendship it will be impossible.
Love becomes a bondage and friendship becomes a freedom. That's the beauty of it and the benediction of it....
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