“What does it mean to love? For Valentine’s Day, author and feminist Marilyse Hamelin encourages us to put aside the traditional flowers, boxes of chocolates and candlelit dinners to instead reflect collectively on the meaning of love with a capital A.
” What is love ? How do we love? Who do we love? Why do we love? It’s such an obvious subject, it’s so much in our face that we no longer see it, we no longer question it. And yet, there is a lot to say, a lot to learn yet, ”says Marilyse Hamelin, who is at the origin of the essay, in an interview. 15 short essays on lovewhich will be published on Tuesday by Somme tout.
In this collection, 14 authors have joined their voices to his to deliver their thoughts on this universal theme. Among them: humorist Maude Landry, actress Mylène Mackay, author Maude Nepveu-Villeneuve, psychiatrist Ouanessa Younsi and activist Laura Doyle Péan.
Through the approximately 150 pages of the book, the stories follow one another, intersect, sometimes oppose each other. We talk about love at first sight, romanticism, marital love, but also toxic love, sexual orientation, celibacy. It is also about love of the French language, love of animals, and self-esteem. Because yes, love mixes with all the sauces.
self-esteem
With this collection, Marilyse Hamelin wanted to deconstruct and dissect love to offer everyone a book that wants to be “a therapy, an exorcism, a meditation”. She herself laid bare, taking the pen first. “It’s not easy, love,” she begins. The tone is set.
“Love is a lot of work. It’s anything but a fairy tale ”, summarizes the one who describes herself as an eternal anguish in the face of romantic love. However, she does not hesitate to “show herself vulnerable” by delivering her own experience.
But if there’s one thing to take away from his remarks, it’s the importance of loving yourself. ” It’s the starting point. You have to love yourself to be able to love others. Unfortunately, we live in a society where it is frowned upon to say “I love myself”, it is perceived as vanity, whereas it is the basis”, she believes.
This notion of self-love recurs in several texts in the collection, including that of actress Mylène Mackay, who delivers a powerful plea against toxic love.
Full of humour, the first part of his text takes the form of a (long) list of ” red flag to never ignore on the first date. Examples ? “He wants to make you his muse: red flag. He wants to make you his nurse: red flag. He explains life to you: red flag. He speaks badly of his mother or his ex: red flag. »
His warning turns into a cry from the heart, into a “total refusal of toxic love”. “This text is inspired by these last years of violence that we have experienced with the pandemic, the waves of denunciations and feminicides”, specifies Mylène Mackay in an interview.
friendships too
For Carmélie Jacob, lecturer in literature at UQAM, talking about love means reflecting on the place that our friends occupy in our hearts and stopping to think of love only in its romantic form.
“Why can’t our love, our time, be divided among several important people in our lives rather than concentrated on one? she asks herself. Because we put a lot of pressure on one person by expecting our lover to also be our best friend, our travel partner, our drinking sidekick, our financial advisor, our co-parent, our therapist, our confidant or even our mentor.
“We have to stop concentrating our love in one and the same place”, emphasizes Carmélie Jacob in an interview, inviting everyone to ask themselves: “Can I turn to someone else to raise a child, to buy a house, to go around the world? The answer will often be yes, plenty of models exist. »
Where are the men ?
Not surprisingly, the majority of people who took part in the collective are women. “I would have liked to hear the vulnerability of men on this subject… but obviously, it is still taboo”, regrets Marilyse Hamelin. Still, it’s not for lack of trying. She says she asked a dozen men and received almost as many refusals. The only one to have accepted from the outset is the author Julien Gravelle.
“I was a little disappointed to see all these men raising their noses on the subject. But Raphaëlle Corbeil’s essay allowed me to better understand why,” she underlines.
In her text, Raphaëlle Corbeil talks about the love imbalance in heterosexual couples, women – she being the first – generally being more involved in their relationship than their partner. The author, who is also a sociology teacher, explains how our gendered socialization plays a role in this love imbalance.
From the earliest childhood, girls are rocked with love stories and boys are told adventure stories. “If boys are taught to be disinterested in love, even to be disgusted by it, how can we expect to see them build fulfilling romantic relationships as adults? »
“I had never thought about the question from this angle, recognizes Marilyse Hamelin. And that is the richness of this collection, which keeps making me think every day. He changed my life, and I hope he will change the lives of others too. »