The story of the mountaineer Edurne Pasaban is known: At 31, after climbing his eighth ochomil, he attempted suicide under a depression and spent several months in a psychiatric hospital.

However, it is noteworthy that the outbreak of the psychiatric crisis was not its pressure as an elite athlete, nor the death in the expeditions, nor the loss of two fingers along the way.

Depression was not cured on the mountain, but at home. When he returned to Gipuzkoa (with his body exhausted, with his proud heart), no one was waiting for him because his boyfriends did not accept his life. They broke the relationship, or worse, they disappeared without giving explanations.

“It’s normal, girl, with the life you have...” Edurne was told by those around him. But then, why did the men in the group have as many children as women? Why didn't they have to choose between family and mountaineering? Look, because you know that the woman is the warrior's rest, and that that warrior is a man.

In the interview I've done to Pasaban, he explained to me that in therapy he understood that the origin of his suffering was not mountain, but affective dependence. When he cultivated it, he went out into the world, returned to alpinism. She managed to be the first woman in the world to climb the fourteen ochomilles. The mountain, he and his faithful lover, found him waiting.

This story shows that the social power imposed by the patriarchy on women is more suffocating than being at the top of Everest, that is, we are born to be a wife and a mother, and that task is contrary to our professional success. The pain caused by this dual fate is more suffocating than the lack of oxygen. In fact, in the minds of heterosexual women over 30 who want to be mothers, two concerns overlap: “Will anyone love me?” “Will I get my children’s father to know in time?”

Noemí López Trujillo performs a gender and class analysis of this discomfort in his book The Empty Belly. He points out that, in addition to the precariousness that has deepened in our generation, the imbalances that condition heterosexual relations hinder the desire for motherhood. In fact, men don't bear as much biological or social pressure as women do. In addition, they should not face the dilemma of choosing between work and family. One option for autonomy is to have a single volunteer mother, but it is clear that this family model requires great social protection and economic resources.

The communiqué issued by Euskal Herriko Gazteak on February 14 with the hashtag #SanValentHIL has proposed an alternative to the romantic love model that, although it does not mention the maternal knot, can be useful to liberate it from the nuclear family: to weave a community network of quality relationships, beyond the couple, with friends, neighbors or militants.

The feminist economy has reminded us that we are not autonomous beings, but interdependent. That is why we should not go to the psychologist just the women, but also the Machistan men who want to force us to give up our passions.

Perhaps a more serious problem than our affective dependence is the capitalist patriarchal system itself, which makes us believe that, in addition to giving priority to love, we have to choose between our career and the creation of a family.

Perhaps to take care of our mental health we need both feminism and therapy.