Growing Apart

“Unless you learn to enjoy the differences as you grow, falling apart or growing apart will naturally happen.”

—Sadhguru

Question: I have been married for four years. It was a love marriage. We came together out of love, but we have grown apart as the years have gone by. Why is this happening?

Sadhguru: So you came together in love, then slowly you fought, and without knowing why, you fell apart.

If you plant a coconut tree and a mango tree in your garden when they were young saplings, they would have been of the same height. You thought they would get along pretty well and it would be a great love affair! If both of them remain stunted and never grow, they will remain compatible – the same height and everything – but both of them will remain dwarfed. However, if both of them grow to their full potential, obviously they will grow to different heights, different shapes and different possibilities.

If we are looking for sameness between two people, then a relationship will always fall apart. After all, a man and a woman come together because they are different. It is the difference that brought the two of you together.

Unless you learn to enjoy the differences as you grow – and the differences may become starker and more manifest as you grow – falling apart or growing apart will naturally happen. If you are expecting both of you to grow in the same direction and in the same way, that is unfair to you both. It will curtail and suffocate both your lives. Unless people learn to enjoy each other’s differences, they cannot stay together – depending on how fast you are growing, you will fall apart in years or months or days.

This whole expectation that your partner should be just like you is a sure way to destroy relationships. It is a sure way to destroy the garden. If we maintain situations in such a way that one person is compulsively dependent upon the other, or both are compulsively dependent upon each other, you cannot keep the situation going forever. Unless you allow, nurture and enjoy the differences between two people, there is no way to stay together.

We need to understand that these relationships have happened because of certain needs – physical, emotional and psychological needs. As people grow and mature, these needs will change. When these needs change, what looked like everything between two people may not feel the same way after some time. We do not have to base the relationship on those same needs forever and feel that the relationship has fallen apart. We can always make the whole relationship 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 and matures in many different ways.

If that change is not made, growing apart or falling apart is bound to happen.