who is afraid of his emptiness cannot really love.

People come to me and say it is so difficult to be alone because one starts feeling one’s emptiness.

Then you seek friends, then you seek lovers, and the whole effort from the very beginning is doomed, because a man who is afraid of his emptiness cannot really love.

He is afraid. Deep down there is fear. How can he love? When he moves and pretends that he is in love with somebody he is just trying to escape from himself, his own emptiness.

He is trying to forget that somewhere inside there is emptiness and nothingness.

He is trying to fill that emptiness by somebody’s presence – and the other is also doing the same.

So almost ninety-nine per cent of the love affairs on this earth are false.

Sooner or later you come to realize that they have been deceptive.

Lovers come to realize that they have been deceived, fooled.

But they think that the other has fooled them, they never think that they have also done the same thing to the other.

And they don’t understand the misery of human beings and their stupidity;
if they understood their own stupidity, what they are doing, they would be able to feel compassion for all.

When you cannot be alone, silent, it means you are afraid of your loneliness, you want to fill it by somebody.

You pretend.

The other is also doing the same with you, he cannot be alone.

Two persons who cannot be alone are trying to be together; now this is going to be a miserable phenomenon.

A Hell.

OshO 
Tao: The Three Treasures, Vol 1
CHAPTER 7. ON THE UTILITY OF NOT BEING