JOIN USQuestioner: Very often we find that two people, who come together out of love, grow apart as the years go by. Is there any way of preventing this?
Sadhguru: If you plant a coconut tree and a mango tree in your garden¸ when they were young saplings they were of the same height. You thought they will get along pretty well, a great love affair! But if both of them remain stunted and never grow, they will remain compatible, same height, everything, if both of them remain dwarfed. But if both of them grow to their full potential, obviously they will grow to different heights and different shapes and different possibilities.
If we are looking for sameness between two people, then always it will fall apart. After all a man and a woman come together because they are different. So it is the difference that brought you together and unless you learn to enjoy the differences as you grow, and the differences may become starker and more and more manifest as one grows. If you do not enjoy the differences, then falling apart or growing apart will naturally happen.
If you are expecting both the people to grow in the same direction, in the same way then that's unfair to both the people. It will curtail and suffocate both their lives.
Unless people learn to enjoy each other's differences, people cannot stay together. Whether you fall apart in years or in months or in days, it simply depends on how fast you are growing.
So this whole expectation that the person who partners with you should be just like you, is a sure way to destroy relationships. It's a sure way to destroy the garden. Unless you allow, nurture and enjoy the differences between two people, there is no way to stay together. Or we maintain the situations in such a way, one person is compulsively dependent upon the other, or both are compulsively dependant upon each other.
And we need to understand that these relationships have happened because of certain needs - physical, emotional, psychological needs. And as people grow and mature, these needs will change. When these needs change, what looked like everything between two people, after some time doesn't feel the same way.
We don't have to base the relationship on those same needs forever and feel that it's over. We can always make the whole thing mature into something else. Whatever the needs that brought us together need not be the fundamentals of our relationship forever. The very fundamentals have to change as time passes, as one ages, one matures in many different ways. If that change is not made, growing apart or falling apart is definitely a certainty.