Tracy McMillan
Tracy McMillan
Tracy McMillanis an American author, television writer and relationship expert. She's known for the 2011 viral blog post "Why You're Not Married," which for two years was the most-viewed article on Huffington Post, and is fourth most read post of all time. She also wrote a book based on the piece, "Why You're Not Married...Yet". Her screenwriting credits include Mad Men, Necessary Roughness, Chase, Life on Mars, and The United States of Tara. She won the 2010 Writers Guild of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNon-Fiction Author
Date of Birth12 September 1964
CityMinneapolis, MN
CountryUnited States of America
Without really trying to, I've become a sort of jailhouse lawyer of relationships - someone who's had to do so much work on her own case that I can now help you with yours.
Rather than diminishing the idea of 'truly needing' a relationship - and trying to deny it, shame it, or talk ourselves out of it - why not just celebrate it? It's exactly what the world needs.
The thing is, relationships never work out... until they do. You learn a lot from relationships that don't work out.
People who find that they have a lot of drama in their relationships need to allow themselves to get 'bored'. At first, it will feel excruciating, and they may find themselves confronting a very real fear underneath all that drama: being truly close and therefore vulnerable to another human being.
Being in a relationship is a hard, painful slog at least once a week, maybe more often - especially if you have a lot of defenses to let down, or if your parents didn't know how to love you very well.
When relationships don't work out, it doesn't mean you're a bad person, it just means you weren't meant to be together.
Relationships are like the world's most intense yoga! It's a daily practice.
Is our desire for partnership just an evolutionary remainder, a Togetherness Delusion, where millions of women only think they need a relationship to be truly happy? Maybe. But you know what? That's fine with me.
Ask anyone who has been in a love relationship for a while: nothing is perfect.
Work is a different type of pursuit than relationships. You can't take the skills that you know that have gotten you into that great school or into that great job and apply them to your relationships.
We have this false idea in our culture that if you haven't made it by 30, then you're never going to do anything interesting. My 40s have been the most incredible time of my life.
Somehow, married or single, we'd rather anesthetize ourselves with love substitutes than go for the real thing, because let's face it: The real thing is pretty scary.
If I had an office job, I'd probably be doing the exact same thing I'm doing on television: hanging out by the water cooler and talking to co-workers about their relationships.
I've been standing at water coolers for the past thirty years talking to women about their love lives, and here's what I've learned: Eventually, most women I know want to be partnered.