“I’ll give it to you right away, then you can stop reading the book. The recipe for love is simple: intimacy calls for intimacy,” writes comedian Léa Stréliski in her new essay. We nevertheless proposed to him to develop his thought.
Léa Stréliski, author of personal growth books? “It doesn’t bother me at all that people say that, because that’s what I do, but at the same time, I play with it,” replies the comedian, columnist, immoderate tweeter and new host of the nice podcast in my week. “It has a total vacuum salesman side to call it The recipe for love. It’s the language of marketers, who claim to have found the magic recipe, when it’s impossible to find the recipe for anything. »
This second essay is therefore the book of a woman who “knows that she knows nothing”, but to whom “life has nevertheless taught certain things”, and who wanted to offer them to share. If she has been in a relationship with the same man for 16 years and has created three children with her legitimate tender, now aged 8, 11 and 13, Léa Stréliski has already been among those who are looking for “a handsome guy with nice shoes and money. “I was in my twenties and like everyone else, I was drawn to the shiny. »
It was before Pierre Alexandre, the one she secretly had a crush on in 3e year of primary school, finds her on Facebook and proposes to her, after a few days of epistolary exchanges, that they meet under a bridge in the neighborhood of their childhood.
A real romantic comedy scene? “But what is even more beautiful, specifies Léa Stréliski, is that in our case, it was not artificial. »
The work of love
Despite this first butterfly flight under angelic auspices, this relationship, because life is not a movie, will encounter some inevitable pitfalls for anyone who refuses to give up at the first obstacle. Love is hard work, said Jean-Pierre Ferland (as well as Léa Stréliski’s grandmother). But what kind of book are we talking about when we say this seemingly unexciting phrase?
PHOTO PATRICK SANFAÇON, THE PRESS
Lea Stréliski
Work is all the conversations that weave your bond. These are all the subjects that must be addressed in everyday life: how we raise children, where do we live, who empties the dishwasher, to which you add intimate relationships. The job is to have the courage to say all those things that are hard to say and that are not comfortable.
Lea Stréliski
The happy bride confirms that, as she mentions in her book, one day she hadunfriender her husband, after a very tempestuous spat. She will later have the humility to send him a friend request. ” I have already refriended hubby, yes, and that tells you everything you need to know about the humor it takes to be a long-term couple! she exclaims. “Because growing up together means learning to argue better. »
Quarrel well, an essential skill to acquire for lovers driven by the hard desire to last? Undeniably. “But often, when we argue, we just look for the link with the other, specifies Léa. It took me a while to figure out that a couple that’s fighting sometimes just needs to screw it up. » You will have read it here.
The side love of the force
Intimacy calls for intimacy, writes Léa Stréliski in this book which, like the previous one, life is a racepraises the merits of a profound work of self-knowledge, a condition sine qua non so that his relationship with the other is born on solid foundations. A job that can only be accomplished by staying one or two arm’s length from the machined rhythm of taxpayer-consumer life.
If you refuse that life is a race, you inevitably switch to the side love of the force.
Lea Stréliski
But what exactly is intimacy? “It is a relationship to one’s own truth. It is knowing how to express what we are. It is this feeling of inner richness that you have to develop yourself, but that the other nurtures. And that’s the mystery! It’s the mystery that is wonderful: what makes this man, I still want to be with him? Why does he interest me all the time? »
She recognizes it: her couple – heterosexual, united for better and for worse before God, three offspring – corresponds to a tradition that some now consider as a straitjacket. “But my call to love is not rigid”, explains the one who signs here an invitation to reconnect with the sense of wonder proper to these “ninjas of love” that are children.
“My call is a thousand times greater than the example that my couple represents, because love can be part of all our relationships, in our work, our passions, in what we eat, in the decisions we we take, in everything. My book is a call to try to inject it into every corner of our lives. »
The recipe for love
Lea Stréliski
Quebec America
180 pages