Leire went on vacation to Greece with a friend, Marta. We witnessed his joy through social media: photos, jokes, affectionate words… Someone asked me if they are together. No, they're not a couple, they're not lovers. They're friends.

“Peru is the most beautiful man in the world,” Joanes told me. Peru is her former partner. They live on the same street and spend their holidays together. The people of the town murmured: “Will they be together again?”

Carmen and Rosa are about 40 years old. They're close friends and roommates. Rosa has a partner, but she has no intention of going to live with her. When he has a surprise, when he is sad or ill, he tends to resort to Carmen.

Monogamous thinking is so deeply rooted in us that it often surprises us by the close affective relationships that develop outside the sphere of the couple. We've been led to believe that the main kind of love is romantic love, that meets our needs. Our partner must be our only lover, our ideal partner, our traveling partner, our intimate friend. If not, we may not be so in love. Maybe it's not the orange average. Mari Luz Esteban has defined this discourse with the words “loving thought”.

In feminism, we fight against the mytification of romantic love, and that has led us to question monogamy as well. Brigitte Vasallo has given us a lot of reasons to reclaim our ability to love and desire more than one person, as well as to respect that of others. We have learned the theory well, but what has happened when we put it into practice? That those of us who have been educated in monogamy cannot turn the schemes from one day to the next. When we've tried to be more of a couple or lay unsecretly with other people, we've failed and blamed the fashion of polymericity. We've been disappointed and thought it's better to go back to the model we've always had: as usual, putting horns gives less pain. Many articles have also been written on this subject. For example, Coral Herrera Gómez talks about the dangers of believing in the “utopia of feminist polylove.”

In the field of partner models we also tend to follow dichotomous schemes: Monogamy or polymericity? It seems that they are two parallel paths and to go from one to the other we have to take a sudden leap. We came from the model based on repression and control. We've been told that if we have fantasies with other people, they're also branches; or if we masturbate, it's a sign that our partner doesn't satisfy us. In monogamous thinking, we perceive every sign of sexual autonomy as a threat and the lack of jealousy seems suspicious.

On this subject, I have heard in a video by Queer Avengers that we are not whole oranges, but mandarins. It's a part of the Mandarin couple, but we have more: friends, ex couples, roommates, family, hobbies... If we remove a paragraph, the world does not end, we can enjoy others.

There are no shortcuts that suddenly lead us to the utopia of emotional intelligence. Between the violent self-demand of being satisfied with the polimicity and the despair of staying in monogamy, there is another path, longer but quieter: to weave together a different affective culture, based on the diversity of relationships and care.