Today, April 10, I have lived for the first time an earthquake in Managua. As I write these lines, I'm feeling aftershocks. It's eleven o'clock in the evening, and the earthquake has started at five o'clock today. My younger brother and his mother came to visit me yesterday. My heart has been shaken and my neck has shrunk, but what worries me the most is that my 10-year-old brother wakes up scared.

At the moment my last lover has missed me. If this had happened a few months ago, I would now be reassured by your hug. Or if I hadn't been able to come to my neighborhood, at least their voice would have caressed me over the phone.

In tragedies we lack our affective support, the person who transmits security and peace to us. For many it will be the mother, father or grandfather. For others, maybe I'm a good friend. My brother's mother, my father's former partner, just talked on the phone with her sister, and when she hung her, she said: “Now I’m quiet. When I talk to him, I always feel that everything is fine.” I believe that in affective sexual relations it is where I feel most calm. I'm worried that it makes me depend in some way on being a couple.

Feminists have been reflecting for a long time on the model of romantic love, based on dependence and anxiety, on the myth of medium orange or on expressions such as “without you I am nothing”. Both women and men, heterosexuals and gays and lesbians, we have learned this model from a young age, through films, songs and messages from our environment. Brigitte Vasallo uses the Disney Amodios concept to define this model. Higher incidence in women. From a young age we are programmed to look for the blue prince and to maintain love and motherhood as the axes of our lives. Today we are encouraged to learn and to seek good employment, but the belief that the main source of happiness will be the construction of the nuclear family remains deeply rooted.

Feminist anthropologist Mari Luz Esteban told Berria journalist Maite Asensio: “It is dangerous to have love as the only resource (...). I don’t mean taking away the love of life, but putting other things.” Most women, myself included, give too much energy for romantic dramas.

I recognize that I have a great attachment to romantic passion. My drug is the preferred one. According to Esteban, “you don’t have to say ‘don’t fall in love’, but ‘the harnesses you have to take’. Just as we go to the mountain with the helmet and the strings, we must also protect ourselves in love, to have a good time, but to get well.” But is it possible to fall in love with harnesses? Is it not necessarily a kind of vertigo like the temptation to jump to the precipice? In Basque, saying “Mait-mindu” shows that we have swallowed that toxic model.

The earthquake can cause a disaster, but at the same time it indicates that the earth is alive. We've been taught that romantic love, which involves the risk of emotional disaster, is the path to feeling alive. Through feminism I have learned that it is possible to live free and healthy loves, protecting my autonomy and well-being. I want to keep falling in love, but always with the center of my life in my person and taking care of the strong relationships that give me intensity and support with many people instead of waiting for the blue princesses. I want to enjoy love as a means of happiness, not as salvation in the face of misfortunes.