La vida entera

There are people who spend their entire lives in the same job, living at the same address, dreaming of moving to another country, or hoping that luck will smile on them. We spend our whole lives re-evaluating life itself. It is a recurrent, stubborn expression, familiar to everyone. It is part of our vocabulary and our list of resolutions. Above all, we spend our entire lives waiting for a love that will last... an entire lifetime. And that is the name of this love story. But let's go a step further: Everyone calls Julieta Torres "Kotufa." Because she's explosive, because she's temperamental, because she's her remedy against sadness, and because it's her battle name when she draws smiles on a child's face. Kotufa is a student who wants to write a graduation thesis about the man of her life. She just doesn't know yet that he's the man of her life. Salvador Duque, a top-tier journalist, has always been her idol, but now he will become her insomnia. Because, let's be clear, love is nothing more than a long, startled bout of insomnia. The key detail to consider is that this is a love story between two people who have nothing in common. Or almost nothing, except two things: journalism and the desire to spend an entire lifetime together. Because it turns out that Kotufa and Salvador are anything but soulmates: he loves meat, she craves vegetables; he hates to sleep, she yawns relentlessly; he longs for the beach, she dreams of the mountains... They are not exactly two of a kind, two peas in a pod, or like-minded personalities. But don't opposites attract? Yes, initially, but for how long? The big question that will relentlessly haunt our characters is: Can two people who are completely different from one another love each other for an entire lifetime? Let's add that Kotufa has a factory defect: she is insufferably beautiful. This makes all men underestimate her intelligence and become obsessed with only getting her into bed. Salvador also has a defect: he is addicted to freedom, a true nomad who never thought of parking himself in the eyes of a single woman. In short: she is too beautiful, and he is too free. And since life ambushes great loves, a blunder will occur: Cristóbal Duque, Salvador's beloved uncle, will fall thunderously in love with the same woman. One more detail for the cocktail? She has a woman's name: Laly Falcón, a successful sales executive whose best offer is her overwhelming sensuality. Laly has been the owner of Salvador's best nights, and now she will have to exercise her warrior skills to maintain her place as queen and lover. All of this will take place in the heart of Exquisita, a high-end women's magazine, where a handful of human beings will deal with the labyrinths of love and the toils of reporting life, while writing recipes to win over men, advice on how to defeat time and its wrinkles, improbable horoscopes, chronicles of social vanity, and universal fashion trends. An Entire Lifetime is a story about love in reverse, a narrative about the social stereotypes that mark the deep skin of the 21st-century woman and explores the stigmas that haunt different types of women: the beautiful, the less beautiful, the single, the overweight, the successful, the less feminine, the esoteric, the divorced... It's about women, but also about men, who spend their entire lives fighting against the labels that society insists on hanging on their identity cards. It's about talking, then, about life and its corridors, about the stigmas that deafen it, about the different people who love each other, and about the unheard-of somersaults of the heart. But also about honoring the most controversial and persecuted profession of these times: journalism; the place usually inhabited by addicts to the truth, the place from which the world and the daily life of all humanity is told. As John Lennon, that great minstrel of simple stories, would say: "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." Or as Kotufa and Salvador would say: Sometimes, to conquer an impossible love, we must invest... an entire lifetime.