“I’ll give it to you right away, then you can stop reading the book.” The recipe for love is simple: intimacy begets intimacy,” writes comedian Léa Stréliski in her new essay. We nevertheless proposed to him to develop his thought.
Léa Stréliski, author of self-help books? “I don’t mind people saying that at all, because that’s what I do, but at the same time, I don’t care,” replies the comedian, columnist, immoderate tweeter and new host of the nice podcast show In my week. “There’s a total vacuum-selling side to calling it The Recipe for Love.” It is the language of marketers, who claim to have found the magic recipe, when it is 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 with her legitimate tender three children 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. »
That was before Pierre Alexandre, the one she secretly had a crush on in the 3rd year of primary school, found her on Facebook and suggested, after a few days of letter exchanges, that they meet under a bridge in the district 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. »
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 utter this seemingly unexciting phrase?
The happy bride confirms that, as she mentions in her book, one day she unfriended her husband, after a very tempestuous spat. She will later have the humility to send him a friend request. “I’ve already refriended my husband, 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 is learning how 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 seek the link with the other, says Léa. It took me a long time to understand that a couple who argues sometimes just needs to fuck. You will have read it here.
Intimacy calls for intimacy, writes Léa Stréliski in this book which, like the previous one, Life is a race, praises the merits of a deep work of self-knowledge, a sine qua non condition for the birth of its relationship with the other on solid foundations. A job that can only be accomplished by staying an arm or two away from the machined rhythm of taxpayer-consumer life.
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’s 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 see 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 specific to these “ninjas of love” that are children.
“My call is a thousand times larger than the example that my couple represents, because love can be inscribed in 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. »