If you have loved someone, when the love has gone you have to be honest and sincere enough to open your heart – in sadness, in sorrow, but still grateful. Even if it lasted for a few days, a few months, those months should be remembered; those sweet moments should fill your heart. And rejoice in one thing – that your wife is honest, truthful. And you be honest also, and truthful.

The question of faithlessness has tortured man immensely. Perhaps there is no other problem which has tortured humanity so much. It creates all kinds of ugly things in you.

First, you are constantly watching – you become a detective – whether your wife is faithful to you or not, whether your husband is faithful to you or not. But why should anybody be faithful to anybody else? Love is faithful, but when love disappears, faith also disappears.

Kahlil Gibran is pointing to an important thing: If any one of you would bring to judgment the unfaithful wife, let him also weigh the heart of her husband in scales, because love or lovelessness happens almost simultaneously. When it has disappeared in the heart of the woman, it has also disappeared in the heart of the man.

Perhaps lust has remained – lust is more permanent than love, because lust is not part of your being. It is part of your chemistry, part of your hormones; it is biological, there is nothing spiritual in it. But a great misunderstanding continues: you go on calling your lust, love. Not to deceive others – although they are deceived – but to deceive yourselves, perhaps unconsciously.

You cannot live without your wife; it has become a habit. Love is not a habit and love knows no boundaries. If a woman can love you, why can’t she love somebody else? She can find someone who is more loving than you – and society has expected you to go on clinging to each other whether you love or not. Then there is suspicion, then there is continuous anxiety, and sooner or later, whether you say it or not, you cannot hide it. Neither can you hide your love nor can you hide your lovelessness.

You cannot hide a flame, you cannot hide its absence. When the flame was there, young and dancing, there was light all around. When the flame is gone, the same space is filled with darkness.

I differ with Kahlil Gibran on this point. I would like you to be loving – and love can be your whole, lifelong affair. But it need not be tethered and imprisoned.

In an authentic human society, marriage will be a crime. When two persons love, they feel good to be together, what is the need of marriage? And one day they find that the unknown visitor, the guest from the beyond, has left. They have again become strangers to each other. Truth demands that they should, with sadness and sorrow, expose their hearts to each other – that they are no longer beating in harmony and it is time for them to depart. Depart as friends; there is no need of any divorce.

Divorce is the by-product of marriage. If there is no need of marriage there is no need of divorce. Both are ugly, imposed.