The first thing: There are two kinds of love. C.S. Lewis has divided love into these two kinds: ’need-love’ and ’gift-love’. Abraham Maslow also divides love into two kinds. The first he calls ’deficiency-love’ and the second he calls ’being-love’. The distinction is significant and has to be understood.
The ’need-love’ or the ’deficiency-love’ depends on the other; it is immature love. In fact it is not truly love – it is a need. You use the other, you use the other as a means. You exploit, you manipulate, you dominate. But the other is reduced, the other is almost destroyed. And exactly the same is being done by the other. He is trying to manipulate you, to dominate you, to possess you, to use you. To use another human being is very unloving.
So it only appears like love; it is a false coin. But this is what happens to almost ninety-nine per cent of people because the first lesson of love that you learn is in your childhood.
A child is born, he depends on the mother. His love towards the mother is a ’deficiency-love’: he needs the mother, he cannot survive without the mother. He loves the mother because mother is his LIFE.
In fact, there is no love; he will love any woman – whosoever will protect him, whosoever will help him to survive, whosoever will fill up his need. The mother is a sort of food that he eats. It is not only milk that he gets from the mother, it is love also – and that too is a need. Millions of people remain childish all their lives; they never grow up. They grow in age, but they never grow in their minds; their psychology remains juvenile, immature. They are always needing love. They are hankering for it like food.
Man becomes mature the moment he starts loving rather than needing. He starts overflowing, sharing; he starts giving. The emphasis is totally different. With the first, the emphasis is on how to get more. With the second, the emphasis is on how to give, how to give more, and how to give unconditionally. This is growth, maturity, coming to you.
A mature person gives. Only a mature person can give, because only a mature person has it. Then love is not dependent. Then you can be loving whether the other is or is not. Then love is not a relationship, it is a state.
C.S. Lewis and Abraham Maslow, The first love that they call ’love’ is not love, it is a need. How can a need be love? Love is a luxury. It is abundance. It is having so much life that you don’t know what to do with it, so you share.
When you depend on the other there is always misery. The moment you depend, you start feeling miserable, because dependence is slavery. Then you start taking revenge in subtle ways, because the person you have to depend upon becomes powerful over you. Nobody likes anybody to be powerful over them, nobody likes to be dependent; because dependence kills freedom, and love cannot flower in dependence. Love is a flower of freedom – it needs space, it needs absolute space. The other has not to interfere with it. It is very delicate.
When you are dependent, the other will certainly dominate you, and you will try to dominate the other. That’s the fight that goes on between so-called lovers; they are intimate enemies – Continuously fighting. Husbands and wives – what are they doing?
Loving is very rare; fighting is the rule, loving is an exception. And in every way they try to dominate – even through love they try to dominate.
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