"It's important for your partner to know your wounds and take care of them."

A few years ago, in her late 40s, writer Muriel Villanueva split up with the father of her children and discovered the dating world on Tinder. "I flirted a lot and it was a lot of fun, I had a great time," she recalls. In the midst of that frenetic pace, she met Isaac: they really liked each other, but things ended there. "I continued at full speed, and he made sure to keep in touch, very slowly, very calmly, in friend mode. We maybe saw each other once a month," says the writer. In 2024, tired of Tinder and so many messes, Villanueva saw it clearly: Isaac was the one she wanted by her side.

"I've always been very intense, with very quick and very physical crushes. This time, the choice was made from my head. "I knew I liked him, that he suited me, that he was a reliable man with a sense of humor. I wasn't in love, but I told myself: 'He'll come.' And so it was." I've been falling in love slowly and very hard, and I think it's a different kind of love I wasn't used to. It was about seeing the person and going in little by little. When I entered a relationship out of infatuation, I would spend the entire relationship waiting for the other person to be who I had initially thought of," explains Villanueva.

Since they've been together, says the writer, Isaac and she have been "like two solar systems coming closer together three times over, sometimes we're families, sometimes we're a stepfamily, sometimes we're a stepfamily five times over," she adds. As the daughter of two mothers, Villanueva has always seen the diversity of families as enriching. "Since I was little, I've been fine with relationships and formats that others didn't even know about," she says. "There are many types of happy love, and what makes me happy has to do with calm and silence, but also with clear and responsible communication." "It's important that my partner knows my wounds and cares for them," she explains. The writer also emphasizes the value of the body: "There are times to talk and times to let bodies understand each other. Sometimes taking off your clothes and being skin-to-skin works better than a long conversation." For her, a happy love is watching a movie with popcorn, making a pan in front of the sea, or taking a break from writing to make love in the middle of the afternoon. "I'm full of life and I don't expect the relationship to fill everything."