The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it's not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another person—without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.

| Osho

Once one has found a partner that accepts them for who they truly are, the objects of desires towards what's external to the relationship suddenly lessen. They never fully disappear, but they diminish in the way that new encounters do not feed anymore the illusion of being finally loved or accepted. Suddenly, these desires outside of the relationship become tools of creativity, fantasy, and love, instead of being an eternal quest for something bigger, more substantial, and more profound. Once this state of acceptance and peace has been reached, the remaining challenge is keeping up the spiritual balance of love, desire, and needs between two radically different entities.