Relationships are made up of multiple manipulative factors: trust, honesty, attraction, passion, compatibility and many other elements that provoke emotions. However, the fundamental ingredient that helps start a healthy relationship is love. Love is comparable to the search for enlightenment. “To seek means: to have a goal; but to find means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal” (113). Love is natural; it is neither researched nor prospective. Love is not tangible. It brings comfort, protection, disillusionment and the millions of nervous butterflies that clutter the stomach. Hermann Hesse traveled through Siddhartha's life covering his ambivalent relationships throughout the novel. Siddhartha's relationships fluctuated according to the changes he himself made. Formerly a Brahmin, he respected his father's thoughts and followed his teachings. Eager to be a Samana, he left love behind to find a new one. When that wasn't enough, his love desired more and materialistic objects captured his soul. He wanted to learn love from the one he thought was a primordial master to finally run away from her. His love then was to find his Self. The river took all its relationships into one place. Through Hesse, Siddhartha proved that without his relationships with his father, Kamala, and with himself, his path to enlightenment would not have developed. Siddhartha's father, a noble Brahmin, gifted his son not only with his teachings but also with his love. As Siddhartha grew up, he rejected his father's love. He wanted to explore beyond the Brahmin tradition and discover Nirvana. His father restricted Siddhartha's ability to realize spiritual wisdom, which gave him a reason to abandon it. However, his father was hesitant... middle of paper ... to protect their relationship. Through his own reflection in his son, Siddhartha's enlightened path rewarded him with the power of listening. Throughout, Hermann Hesse explained how without Siddhartha's relationship with his father, he and Kamala would not have changed as he sought enlightenment. He left his father's love, never to return, only to have the opportunity to play and find a new love. He craved Kamala's teachings of love and their relationship moved from denial to acceptance. In his son he saw a reflection of himself and had to release love when it could no longer be restrained. Hesse revealed the existence until enlightenment that survived through the value of love in a relationship. Overall, enlightenment could not breathe without the continuous pulse of love. Works Cited Hesse, Hermann, Siddhartha, New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2003