While headlines fixate on Justin Trudeau stepping out with Katy Perry, his ex-wife Sophie Gregoire Trudeau is writing a very different kind of love story. In a deeply personal newsletter timed to Valentine’s season, the former Canadian first lady admits that being single at 50 can feel lonely, yet she also reframes it as a reckoning, a reset, and a new chapter in how she loves herself.
TLDR
In a new Closer Together newsletter, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau reflects on being uncoupled at 50, reframing a lonely Valentine’s Day as a turning point in her own self-love, co-parenting, and post-First Lady identity.
A Lonely Valentine at 50
Gregoire Trudeau did not sugarcoat the mood around this Valentine’s Day. According to DailyMailUS, she wrote in her Closer Together newsletter that the holiday feels different now that she is on her own again. She acknowledged that on the surface, being “uncoupled” at 50 on a day devoted to romantic love does not exactly feel glamorous. In the same breath, she admitted that the heart-saturated month of February can feel “especially loud” for anyone navigating what she calls “midlife singlehood.”
Her message was not just about loneliness. It was about rejecting the quiet cultural script that treats a long marriage ending as a personal failure. Gregoire Trudeau suggested that this phase of life can be something else entirely. She described it as a kind of emotional reset, writing that “often, it is a recalibration, a moment where the noise quiets enough for us to hear our own voice again.” For a woman whose public identity was once tethered to a prime minister, that idea lands with particular weight.
Rewriting the Rules of Self-Love
The Valentine’s dispatch is in keeping with the evolution of Gregoire Trudeau’s public voice. No longer Canada’s de facto first lady, she has been repositioning herself as a guide through the emotional turbulence of midlife, especially for women. In her newsletter, she wrote that for millions, the answer to who we are without a partner “has not always been simple.” She reflected that many of us have been taught, “sometimes gently, sometimes harshly,” that our bodies, emotions, and even our authenticity need adjusting in order to be accepted.
She went further into the nervous system level of that conditioning, explaining that when people spend years reshaping themselves to fit in, “our nervous system learns vigilance instead of ease.” In her view, reclaiming self-love means noticing those defenses and gently unlearning them. “In many ways, self-love is being aware of our defense mechanisms and adaptive behaviors,” she wrote. “It is about unlearning them and choosing to change some of our emotional habits. Self-love is a practice. At its core, it is safety. And safety comes from presence.”
Coming from someone whose life once unfolded under the flash of cameras and the scrutiny of partisan politics, the language of nervous systems and safety carries a subtle critique of the performance that public women are often expected to maintain. Gregoire Trudeau is inviting readers to imagine that a woman can step away from center stage and still be powerful, simply by owning her own emotional weather.
Justin, Katy, and the Optics
All of this is unfolding as Justin Trudeau’s own romantic life has taken a more traditional celebrity turn. According to DailyMailUS, the former Canadian prime minister has been linked to American pop star Katy Perry, 41, after the two were spotted together in recent months, including during the World Economic Forum in Davos. The coverage around him has leaned into familiar language about a man “loved up” and moving on, a narrative that practically writes itself when one half of a former first couple is seen beside a global music star.
Gregoire Trudeau, for her part, has been careful to keep the focus on family rather than romantic scorekeeping. She has publicly rejected the label of single mother, emphasizing that Trudeau remains present in their children’s lives. As DailyMailUS noted, she has said, “I am definitely not a single mom. I have a partnership with a father who has such deep love and availability to his children.” It is a line that protects his reputation as a father, even as tabloid attention shifts to his new relationship, and it underscores her own commitment to a functional, if reconfigured, family unit.
The contrast is striking. He is photographed on international stages, newly coupled. She is writing long, vulnerable paragraphs about nervous systems and self-protection. Yet in public, she refuses the role of aggrieved ex. Instead, she appears to be engaged in a quieter project, one that trades the power of proximity to a leader for the power of naming what midlife reinvention actually feels like.
From First Lady to Solo Voice
Their uncoupling did not happen overnight. According to CBC News, Justin Trudeau and Sophie Gregoire Trudeau announced their separation after 18 years of marriage in August 2023, releasing matching statements that emphasized respect and co-parenting. The split ended a high-profile partnership that began before his time in office and carried through three children, multiple election campaigns, and nearly a decade in the global spotlight.
In the months that followed, Gregoire Trudeau tried her own hand at romance. DailyMailUS reported that she moved in with Dr. Marcos Bettolli, an Argentine-born pediatric surgeon at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario. In a subsequent divorce petition cited by the outlet, Bettolli’s estranged wife, Ana Remonda, described him as having “re-partnered with a high-profile individual who attracts significant media attention” and noted the security complications for their children. Gregoire Trudeau and Bettolli have since gone their separate ways, another ending that quietly echoes the complexities she now writes about so openly.
Even as her personal life has shifted, she has stepped back into the spotlight on her own terms. In December, she appeared as a special guest on the French Canadian version of “The Masked Singer,” “Chanteurs Masques.” On the show, she performed the 1956 classic “I Put a Spell on You” and “Faufile,” a 2017 song by Quebec star Charlotte Cardin. In one performance, she delivered the line “Everything I love, I break,” a lyric that, in light of her recent history, felt loaded with meaning.
Yet in interviews and public comments, she consistently centers gratitude for the family she and Trudeau built. The former couple share three children, Xavier, Ella-Grace, and Hadrien, and she continues to praise her ex-husband’s devotion to them. According to DailyMailUS and Canadian outlets, she has spoken of Trudeau as a deeply engaged father, a point she reiterated in her Valentine’s reflections. The result is a portrait of a woman determined to own her heartbreak and her healing without tearing down the man she once loved.
In Gregoire Trudeau’s telling, a “lonely” Valentine does not mean a loveless life. It signals a season in which love is being renegotiated, redirected, and reclaimed, away from red-carpet optics and toward something less photogenic but far more durable: the slow work of figuring out who you are when the world stops introducing you as someone’s other half.
Join the Discussion
How do you see Sophie Gregoire Trudeau’s candid reflections on midlife singlehood and self-love influencing the way high-profile breakups are viewed by the public?
