What can you do? You loved a woman and she never responded to you, so what can you do? Now you can only go on playing with your wound. You are a masochist. I will not say that you are a fool, you are not. You are a masochist, a clever masochist, an intelligent masochist. You are arranging for your torture through the name of love, in the name of love You are playing the game of being a martyr. you are enjoying this crucifixion. You loved a woman; there is no necessity for the woman to love you. Your love is not enough to make it sure. Love is a two-way street, it is not one-way. But down the ages, poets, novelists, people who go on playing with imagination, have been talking about love as if when you love the person, the other person has to love you! The only condition that you have to fulfil is that you should really love. Even then, there is no need for the other to love you. The other has freedom, the other is a living soul. If the other has to love you just because you love, then where is his freedom? Where is his soul or her soul? Then you don’t leave any freedom for the other. If the other does not want you, does not like you, if the other is not turned on by you, then you can go on loving and nothing is going to happen.
Just your love is not enough. In fact, the more you try, the more the other will go far away, because the other will become more and more afraid of you. You are dangerous! Even before love has happened you are not allowing freedom. What will you do when the love has happened? You will suffocate the woman or the man. You will surround the woman in such a way that it will become a prison. Even right now the woman has not responded, but you are waiting. And you are thinking and hoping that because you love, she has to love you. Why? There is no must in it, there is no inevitability in it. Just the reverse will be the case. The more you chase her, the more you will make her afraid of you and the more she will escape from you. You are dangerous. And the paradox is, the more she will be going away from you the more you will fantasise about her.
A real woman very soon loses all charm. So is the case with a real man, because with reality the fiction cannot be continued for long. All relationships settle down by and by – the honeymoon is only short. If you really get the woman, within seven days, fifteen days, three weeks, things will start settling; the fiction, the poetry, the fantasy will start disappearing. The real woman and the real man will come back to earth. You cannot go on moving in the clouds for long. The other’s reality will pull you back to the gravitation.
So when love is responded to, it is finished soon. When love remains unrequited, it can continue for your whole life, because there is no way for it to be finished. You can go on playing in your imagination – games, fantasies, dreams… And the person who has asked the question is an author, Hal Musin. He must be imaginative, poetic. He must be able to create fictions. Now he cannot lose this woman because this woman is giving him great fictions. And she will go on giving you. The only condition is: she should not respond to your love, then the love can continue forever. In that way Majnun was fortunate because he could never get Laila. The really unfortunate people are those who can get their Lailas. Once you get your Laila or your Majnun, things are finished. One man went to see the madhouse. In one room a man was beating his head, crying. Great tears were flowing down his cheeks and he was holding a small picture very lovingly on his chest. The visitor asked the superintendent ’What has happened to this man?’ And the superinterdent said ’You see the picture that he is holding? He holds it day and night. That is the woman he wanted, he had loved, but could not get. Hence, he went mad. He cries and sings songs to her, and goes on thinking of her. That is his whole life. The whole world has disappeared, only the woman… He talks, he talks from his side and the woman’s side, and the dialogue continues.’