Acharya Prashant: The punishment for not having a girlfriend is that you will keep fantasizing about girls. Does that not happen? Who are the ones who always keep salivating? The singles. And you meet someone who is in a relationship, he won't want to look at girls or boys, for that matter. He would say, "One is more than enough. Can't handle one; who wants two, three, or six?"
Don't ogle from afar. She too might be fantasizing about you. The mind is the same. Go approach, talk. Often, the desire to talk would have vaporized by the time you come close to her.
I was talking to someone yesterday. It was a Meet the Master thing. It was a very long discussion, more than three hours. A fellow from California. So the same stuff: finances, wife, kids, problems. In the flow of things I asked, "How is your sex life?" He said, "It was great before marriage." These are the exact words. Once you come close, the fantasy is gone. Start living together and you would find that sex and all such urges have actually diminished. Maintain a mental separation and only the other circulates in your thoughts.
Real brahmacharya lies in coming close to Brahm—and Brahm is the far and the wide, this thing and everything. Really know what a man or a woman is and then see what happens to your perpetual sexual urge. Really know. Knowing sanctifies everything. The urge then would not be that of a depraved monster. Even if you have sex after that, it would have a different quality, a different fragrance.
Mostly the quality of our sexual encounters is that of rape, exploitation. Kabir has put it very poignantly. There is a beautiful couplet of which the first line I'll remember in a few minutes probably. But the second line is so telling. He says, "Kami nar kutta sada, Che ritu barah maas." He says, "Every animal in the universe has only its designated period of mating—some mate in the winter, some mate in the summer, some mate only in the rainy season. Dogs mate only in their designated months. But man is the only creature that fucks the entire year-round." That is the quality of our sex. We never have enough because we do not know what we are doing.
