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Tracy McMillan: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

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Tracy McMillan

Getty Tracy McMillan speaks at the 'Ready For Love' panel.

Tracy McMillan is a relationship expert who appears on OWN’s Family or Fiance. The series, in its second season, follows the emotional upheaval resulting from the introduction of someone’s fiance to that person’s family. McMillan serves as referee, offering advice or admonishment to the eight different groups of unhappy people, as fights erupt and people have to choose: one or the other.

Prior to Family or Fiance, she made a name for herself as a relationship coach, author and TV writer. In recent years, she’s stepped back from the spotlight to write several books about relationships. Now she’s back on screen, telling troubled couples how to solve their problems and manage their family crises. She’s frequent on Oprah.

Here’s everything you need to know about Tracy McMillan:

She Talks to Women for a Living


Her occupation is to talk to women about their relationship issues. In HuffPost she claims that she speaks to 70 women every morning. She also weighs in on topics that women might care about, offering advice in magazines, morning shows and blogs as a guest expert. Her main objective? To tell women why they’re not married yet.

She’s not shy about saying what’s on her mind to those 70 friends of hers and to anyone else she might have encountered in the last decade or so. According to a 2011 article in The Guardian, she has a no-holds-barred approach to explaining why any woman might not have “secured the ring,” explaining that it’s because she is “shallow,” a “bitch” or “not good enough.”

She Wants Women to Stop Having Casual Sex


Her viral blog post that appeared on HuffPost in 2011 explained that women who have recreational sex are “sluts” who are addicted to orgasms and sleep with anyone indiscriminately.

On Oprah, she claimed that casual sex is “what’s keeping you single” and calls it a “real problem” that will destroy your chances of getting married.

In a 2013 interview with Cosmopolitan, McMillan says, “Do not sleep with him in the first place if he doesn’t want a relationship with you.” She says it took her more than 30 years to figure out how to accomplish this herself.

She’s Written Novels Based on Her Life


Her work, including Multiple Listings, Why You’re Not Married…Yet, a novel based on her viral HuffPost blog post, and her memoir, I Love You but I’m Leaving You Anyway, based on her complicated relationship with her father and the men she married.

I Love You but I’m Leaving You Anyway examines how men that are right for us feel wrong and the men who are not good for us feel “so, so right.” It’s a memoir about her life written from the optimistic side of what’s gone wrong. It shows how she learned from her son and how she came to terms with a mostly absent father without focusing on the negative.

Her work includes award winning TV writing for Mad Men, Necessary Roughness and Good Girls Revolt. She has also contributed opinion pieces to Time, Essence and Elle, among others.

She Has Been Married Three Times


According to the New York Times, she first married at 19 to an older man. A few years later, she divorced. A few years after that, she married again and had a child with a wealthy man who cheated on her, after which came a divorce. A few years later, she married husband number three. She divorced him.

Her Mother Was a Prostitute


According to Daily Mail, McMillan’s mother was a drug addicted prostitute and her father was a pimp.

She grew up in foster care in a series of Midwestern homes and dedicated her childhood to reading, says the Chicago Tribune.

The New York Times calls her life the epitome of dragging yourself up “by the bootstraps” to build a career out of a bad experience.

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