The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast were my favorite little films. The little mermaid gives her voice in exchange for the promise to marry the blue prince. The Beautiful manages to humiliate the beast and resurrect the blue prince inside, as love dominates over obstacles.

(Note: The word domesticated has been searched by Elhuyar. Do you know the example given by this dictionary? “Although he was a man of a hard character, his wife has gradually given him away”)

The Little Mermaid taught us that by the promise of love we have to be willing to make any sacrifice. The Beautiful (and Elhuyar) we have to be able to reassure our man. There is a clear connection between sentimental education and the mechanisms of male violence we receive from young women.

When we approached feminism, we learned – as Kate Millet- that love is women’s opium and that to be free we have to end the blue prince. Looking back, we've realized that during adolescence we've spent many hours talking about boys, crying over the disappointments of the fake soldier, waiting for his call. And as we've grown up, when we've had the first "serious" relationships, we've given up too many projects to prioritize the relationship as a couple, and we've suffered too much assault or insolence from the beast.

We have therefore understood that we must deconstruct the ideology of romantic love so as not to fall back on those dynamics – or in the case of those of us who have turned to lesbianism, on the dynamics of the Bollodramans. And then we've started reading eleven books, attending eleven conferences, attending online courses at Coral Herrera Goméz.

Today I have had an epiphany: to reflect so much on love is not the solution, it is the trap.

For the development of this epiphany, I have reread the interview that Maite Asensio conducted long ago to the anthropologist Mari Luz Esteban: “If there is something that makes us women, love has to be at our center, to be the central axis of our life. That's why I think we have to remove love from our center. Removing love from the center will inevitably change our identity as a woman.” (…) “I don’t mean taking away the love of life, but putting other things, balancing. (…) I believe that freedom is very important, justice, solidarity… We have to put at the same level the different forms of love; in this sense, I am concerned that friendship does not have the theoretical and political place it deserves, although in practice it is important.”

On the Pikara magazine route, most of the most read articles are about love. Of the columns that I wrote in ARGIA, the one that most echoed was mandarin (on the alternative of the orange medium paradigm). A feminist bookstore in my city announces a reading club about love and clarifies that they will not study the literary issue, but will limit themselves to discussing love. Why don't we organize a reading club to talk about friendship? This year’s Zinemakumeak festival has also been centred on romantic love. In this era of power of Bolsonaro, Salvini, Trump and Casado, how much are we debating about love in public space and the strengthening of the extreme right?

It is a contradiction that romantic love remains at the center of our feminist reflections to eradicate it from the center of our lives. Let us start by putting all that energy into other political priorities.