According to Osho, he mocks marriage to reveal how a once-living bond has decayed into a social trap: vast expectations, borrowed promises, and postponed happiness that rarely arrive. The institution, repeated without awareness, breeds misery and hypocrisy. His laughter is a wake-up call to reclaim courage—either to reinvent relationship from consciousness and love, or to drop dead patterns and find happiness here-now.
He jokes about marriage because people follow it blindly expecting happiness, but end up unhappy; better to be brave, aware, and create love freshly—or not at all.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Question: The fifth question: Osho, why do you make so much fun of marriage? Marriage is an old institution, very old. And the older it is, the more rotten it has become. Marriage cannot survive in the future; its days are over. We will have to find some new alternatives. The search for alternatives has begun. But in the alternatives now being sought there is one fallacy: they think there was suffering in marriage, and in this alternative there will be no suffering. That is a fallacy. Yes, in the alternatives there may be more or less suffering—but suffering will be there until you become steady within yourself. In fact, the very need for marriage arises because you think happiness can come from another—and there lies the root of all ignorance. Happiness cannot come from the other.
Question: OSHO, WHAT IS WRONG WITH MARRIAGE? WHY DO YOU SPEAK ALWAYS AGAINST IT? MARRIAGE IS a great institution. Without marriage life will be very empty. Without marriage you will be all Buddhas! It is marriage that keeps the world going on; it keeps things running. It keeps all kinds of things moving, alive. In fact, without marriage there will be no religion at all. Religion exists not because of God or for God; it is because of marriage. Marriage creates so much misery that one has to meditate; meditation is a byproduct. Without marriage, who will bother to meditate? For what? You will be already blissful! Without marriage there will be no renunciation, Buddha would not have left the world -- for what? His wife, Yashodhara, must have created the situation -- Mahavira would not have escaped to the mountains.
Question: A friend has written a letter, requesting that I not reveal his name. He writes: Osho, for the past few days, every morning in discourse you have been unleashing a torrential downpour of poisonous, sarcastic arrows at the sacred, religious, and bliss-giving relationship called marriage. My married heart has been pierced and is roasting in the flames of anger and revenge. If you do not at once stop making fun of marriage, I warn you the consequences will not be good. This is not a threat, but a hundred-percent true prior announcement: if from now on you tell any joke about husband and wife and strike at my social and conjugal sentiments... that she-devil has just stepped out... then I will not be able to bear it and, carried away by emotion, I will divorce my wife—and then whatever happens, happens. I won’t care.
Osho, whenever I listen to you, my firm resolve to get married shatters. But whenever I think on my own, I get stuck—should I marry or not? In the last two days you have said that a wise person should not marry. Now tell me, Osho, what should I do? Nothing makes sense to me. Please show me the way!
Throw the scrap into the scrap, Babu Musaddilal came from the office, but before setting foot across the threshold he was so nervous— as if within the lintel, stretching for miles, there lay a blazing desert and he were parched. Or else a haunt of spirits, a ghostly cremation ground, with cleavers raised overhead. Home was no home, but some kind of menagerie with ferocious beasts inside, all hungry and all unchained. Who knows what curse of Durvasa was upon him that he was not of one, not of two— he was the father of five girls. Ill-starred and pitiable, they were turning pale; their hands had not yet been hennaed—still maidens. The first girl, with red ink, was coloring her nails; the second wanted to as well, was tempted, but held back out of shame; the third was saving yesterday’s chutney for tomorrow; the fourth, a dry roti in…
What does it mean 'the honeymoon is over'?
Another thing the society does: the society does not allow any extramarital sex, so naturally the husband HAS to make love to the wife, and the wife HAS to make love to the husband. If you are allowed only one food to eat and no other food is allowed, how long can you wait? You have to eat it. This is the trick of the society. If extramarital sex were allowed, then there is every possibility that the husband may not want to make love to the wife, the wife may not like to make love to the husband. Just out of hunger, and with no other outlet, they start making love to each other. Out of desperation, they start becoming associated with each other. Then children are born... and more ties: religious, social ties. Then the children and the responsibility... and the family starts rolling. Love-marriage is bound to…