We live together and we never know anything of what togetherness is. You can live together for years without knowing what togetherness is. Look all over the world — people are living together, nobody lives alone: husbands with wives, wives with husbands, children with parents, parents with friends; everybody is living together. Life exists in togetherness, but do you know what togetherness is?
Your togetherness is suffering. That is why Jean-Paul Sartre says, "The other is hell"…because with the other you simply suffer, the other becomes the bondage, the other becomes the domination. The other starts creating trouble, and your freedom is lost, your happiness is lost. Then it becomes a routine, a tolerance.
If you are tolerating the other how can you know the beauty of togetherness? Really, it has never happened.
Marriage almost always never happens, because marriage means the celebration of togetherness. It is not a license. No registry office can give you marriage; no priest can give it to you as a gift. It is a tremendous revolution in the being, it is a great transformation in your very style of life, and it can happen only when you celebrate togetherness, when the other is no longer felt as the other, when you no longer feel yourself as I.
When the two are not really two, a bridge has happened, they have become one in a certain sense. Physically they remain two, but as far as the innermost being is concerned, they have become one. They may be two poles of one existence but they are not two. A bridge exists. That bridge gives you glimpses of togetherness.
It is one of the rarest things to come across a marriage. People live together because they cannot live alone. Remember this: because they cannot live alone, that is why they live together. To live alone is uncomfortable, to live alone is uneconomical, to live alone is difficult, that is why they live together. The reasons are negative.
This is the logic. You live with someone because it is comfortable, convenient, economical, cheaper. To live alone is really difficult: a wife is so many things, the housekeeper, the cook, the servant, the nurse — so many things. She is the cheapest labor in the world, doing so many things without being paid at all. It is an exploitation.
Marriage exists as an institution of exploitation, it is not togetherness. That is why no happiness comes out of it as a flowering. It cannot. Out of the roots of exploitation how can ecstasy be born?
Life comes through birth but the wisdom, the experience, the ecstasy, has to be learnt. Hence the meaning of meditation. You have to earn it, you have to grow towards it, you have to attain a certain maturity; only then will you be able to know it.
Life can open to you only in a certain moment of maturity. But people live and die childishly. They never really grow, they never attain to maturity.
OSHO