The Totally Radical, Completely Normal Wisdom of Dating Guru Jillian Turecki

This winter, I went on a girls trip. Naturally, all we spoke about was boys. My friend was newly seeing someone after ending a five-year on-again, off-again relationship. I was back with someone I’d already had a thing with five years prior, but still didn’t know any better. Lounging in the pool of our Costa Rica resort, drinking strawberry daiquiris, we dissected our respective entanglements from every angle and via every therapy-speak cliche. Did our attachment styles complement each other’s? Were these men truly emotionally unavailable, or just… male? How long was simply too long not to get a text back?

And when my friend tried to gently break the news to me that my situationship shouldn’t survive the vacation, she led with: “Well, you know what Jillian would say…”

“Who?”

“Um, the breakup fairy godmother? Jillian Turecki.”

She DMed over one of Turecki’s videos and I proceeded to spend the afternoon immersed in the relationship coach’s feed. Somehow the experience felt relaxing and productive at once. Turecki, an almost shockingly youthful 50, wore her gleaming brunette hair in loose waves, Zooey Deschanel-style curtain bangs framing her face just so. Her no-makeup makeup application could have been plucked straight from a Glossier campaign. Her voice, soft and serene, evoked a Yoga with Adriene workout or a Nara Smith cooking video. Then there was the advice itself. It was — in a surprise twist for a social media shrink — really good. And exactly what I needed to hear. “Repeat after me,” she intoned. “I don’t want anyone who doesn't want me.” Had I just discovered the next big thing?

When I scrolled up, though, I discovered that Turecki was no niche micro-influencer: She already had 2 million followers, some of whom were my closest friends. Others were celebrities ranging from Vanderpump Rules’ Tom Schwartz and Katie Maloney (who recently ended their marriage, then romanced the same woman), both Bijou Phillips and Busy Philipps (different number of L’s and P’s but both divorcées), and even some of the biggest f*ckboys I follow (you know who you are). I was late to the party.

The current dating apps backlash and so-called sex recession isn’t just about less f*cking, it’s also set the stage for what the New York Times is calling the “dating pundit industrial complex.” This is a world where everyone from a former Bachelor star to the Hawk Tuah Girl to random TikTokers preaching the principles of the vintage dating bible Why Men Love Bitches have achieved virality by pandering to our desperation for relationship advice. “You can very easily end up in this annoying, radioactive slime of DateTok where the messaging can feel optimized for clicks and engagement. Like, ‘Here’s how you trick a guy into liking you,’” says business book author Ali Kriegsman. But, as I’d come to learn, nothing about Turecki is annoying. Kriegsman put it this way: “She’s such a palette cleanser: She’s calm, collected, eloquent, and actually hopeful.”

Optimism about dating? In this economy? Sign me up!

This spring, I became the envy of all my single friends when I announced that I would be meeting Turecki for lunch in Soho that afternoon. (“STOP! I’m so jealous,” one Turecki disciple texted. “Can you ask if she’s an air sign?” wrote another.) It’s an unseasonably hot day, and Turecki is dressed in oversized black linen pants and thin-rimmed aviator glasses, not a sweat mark in sight. As we wait for our table, a girl walks past wearing a T-shirt that reads: “I’ve talked about you in therapy.” “That’s funny,” Turecki says in a voice so soothing it feels like the auditory equivalent of drinking cucumber water.

“My husband didn’t come home that day. He supported us financially. My mom only had a couple months to live. I was like, ‘Oh my God, what am I going to do?’”

While Turecki primarily resides in Miami these days, New York is still very much her hometown. Her parents immigrated here in 1968 from South Africa, where her Jewish father had settled after fleeing Poland during World War II. (He and Turecki’s mother, a South African model, met in Johannesburg.) Once in the States, Turecki’s father continued his psychiatry practice, and the family settled on the Upper East Side. The Tureckis envisioned a traditional life for their daughter, which she dutifully followed: private high school, sleepaway camp in the Catskills, and later, Washington University in St. Louis. “They really wanted me to experience the American dream. Get the job, the 401K, marry a Jewish doctor,” she says. But after a year at WashU, she transferred to the less prestigious Clark University. “College wasn’t very memorable for me. All I can [recall] is the boys that I liked, the relationships I had.” A bunch of short, uninspired stints in the corporate and fashion world soon followed.

By the early 2000s, Turecki had become a yoga instructor downtown at the cult-beloved studio Kula Yoga Project — "All the cool kids went there," she says — where she developed the kind of rabid following she could have turned into an Instagram following, if Instagram existed back then. She’d also gotten married at 38, and had begun trying for a baby. “We were together for about four and a half years, but it was a really tough marriage. I’d experienced a miscarriage, but we never talked about how difficult it was. Instead, he shut down and I felt totally unsupported,” she tells me from our two-top on the private balcony at Sadelle’s, looking over the dining room full of amateur food-luencers photographing their bagel towers. Shortly thereafter, Turecki’s mother was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, and Turecki found the isolation of the grief she felt unbearable. (Her mom died in 2014.)

Recalling this period, Turecki speaks in the slow, deliberate cadence she uses in her videos. She never raises her voice for emphasis — a refreshing departure from the DateTokers who shout, “If he wanted to, he would!” — but rather elongates certain words to underscore her point. “Right before he left, I was pregnant again and it was veryyyy, veryyyy, veryyyy early. Then one morning I woke up bleeding, and he didn’t come home that day,” she recalls. Ultimately, her husband broke things off with her over the phone. (She’s never remarried.) “He supported us financially. My mom only had a couple months to live. And here I was like, ‘Oh my God, what am I going to do?’”

A neighbor pointed her to the now-controversial self-help superstar, Tony Robbins. “She found me sitting outside with my dog the day after my husband left and I had a miscarriage,” Turecki says. “She saw I was in despair, sat down next to me, and told me about Tony. I knew of him from his infomercial days and was skeptical, but she sent me some videos of him working with a person at a live event and the rest is history.” After trying one of his courses, Turecki decided to enroll in the Robbins-Madanes Training Center and train to be a certified life coach: “I became obsessed with this notion of, ‘What makes a relationship work? Why am I in this position?’”

“When I saw Minka Kelly share something of hers, I was like, ‘Wow — this belief that our relationship with ourselves is paramount is really hitting people.’”

Turecki found her answer in four simple words that have since become the bedrock of her practice: It begins with you. “Not that you’re the problem, but you have a pattern, and you need to figure out how to value yourself,” she clarifies. The phrase also doubles as the title of her debut book, which hits shelves in January 2025. “Most people don’t know how to love themselves or what it means to really love someone. I’m all about educating people on what it is to love.”

Her message may sound simple, but its elegance was striking to her followers. “When I saw Minka Kelly share something [of Turecki’s] I was like, ‘Wow, this belief that our relationship with ourselves is actually what’s paramount is really hitting people.’ So I cold reached out to her,” literary agent Sarah Passick says. Passick, who also represents Benny Blanco and Christine Quinn, refers to Turecki as an “if you know you know” influencer. And when they started shopping the book to editors? “We had many, many meetings, and a big auction.” The book sold at auction to HarperOne after a bidding war. “People were going crazy for her,” Passick says.

In an era where relationship buzzwords — narcissism, toxicity, gaslighting — put the blame on other people, a book on self-responsibility might sound like a tough sell. But it’s clear that her Instagram following — which she began building in 2016, but didn’t see take off until the pandemic, when she went from 10,000 followers to hundreds of thousands in mere months — has no issue with being the proverbial “problem.” Rather, fans like You star Victoria Pedretti find the idea liberating. “In relationships, there's so much that is out of your control,” says the actor, who listens to Turecki’s Jillian on Love, the 12th most popular relationship podcast on Apple, alongside luminaries in the space like Glennon Doyle and Brené Brown. “So [I like the idea of] focusing on how you can continue to grow yourself; whether it be in service of the relationship, this other person, or, ultimately, you.”

Through her online community, The Conscious Woman, Turecki offers workshops on topics like self-esteem, heartbreak, and “difficult parents,” and her team tells me her subscriber numbers are in the tens of thousands. Membership is $33 a month, and the courses ask a lot of their participants, including a quantity of journaling that verges on The Artist’s Way.

“My most concentrated [audience is] millennials. There are way more women, and a good portion mostly living in big cities,” says Turecki, who, despite being firmly Gen X, embodies a millennial’s hipster sensibility. The vintage-looking delicate chain necklace she wears today chirps of Catbird vibes; her rotating cast of arty frames? Cartier, Moscot, and Jacques Marie Mage. (Her aesthetic is not not part of the appeal.) To me and other advice-hungry baby millennials, she radiates an aspirational, older sister energy. “Before this,” she continues. “I met a friend in Tribeca and a girl maybe in her early 30s came up to me and said, ‘Because of you, I left a very toxic relationship, and now I just got married to the love of my life.’”

“Most people don’t know how to love themselves or what it means to really love someone. I’m all about educating people on what it is to love.”

The experience isn’t unique to that happy fan. The more of Turecki’s followers I spoke to, the more I found that she’d inspired them to make major life changes. Take Kriegsman. “I did the crazy thing that a lot of women do where I was 32, in a six-year relationship, and I f*cking Taylor Swift Joe Alwyn'd [and ended things],” she says. In the aftermath, Turecki’s videos helped Kriegsman identify the behaviors she wanted to work through before getting into her next relationship (which she’s now in). “I wasn’t making my needs known. I had been [conditioned] to feel ashamed of them, but Jillian made me so much more comfortable being vocal about what I was looking for.”

New York-based esthetician Sydney Utendahl also credits Turecki with helping her leave a long-term relationship she never thought she’d be able to walk away from, and giving her the tools to spot trouble as she reentered the dating pool. “Last year, I was seeing a guy who was a f*ckboy and I caught myself trying to be ‘the exception,’” she says. “Instead of trying to make excuses for their toxic behavior and inability to emotionally open up, I just took a step back and shook it off. I had never previously been able to do that before, I’d always fight until the end.”

Another one of Turecki’s signatures, “non-negotiables” — the short list of traits you, personally, need in a partner — helped sexual health and wellness writer Vera Papisova find self-love. “As the eldest daughter of a Russian immigrant family, having emotional needs or non-negotiables feels like a weakness or victim-y,” Papisova says. “But being able to identify your needs is how you tell yourself, ‘I love you so much and you deserve these things from anybody who loves you.’”

Back at the restaurant, Turecki begins to probe me about my love life. (Had I been breadcrumbing little details about my romantic past throughout our conversation? Who’s to say.) Until recently, Turecki had a booming one-on-one coaching business, through which she worked with thousands of clients to refocus their lives and untangle the narratives they’d been telling themselves about who they are in relationships. After 11 years, she wound down that corner of her business. But she tells me that she’s willing to make an exception and do a round of individual sessions for this story. “I can’t wait to get in there,” she says, bringing her hands together and wiggling her fingers with mischievous glee.

We’re only 10 minutes into our Zoom session when Turecki hits me with a punch to the gut. She wants me to think about what would happen if I stopped chasing “signifiers” (in my case, attention) and started prioritizing “connection” (meaning, a healthy relationship). “Self-worth issues can be very sneaky,” she tells me. Today, she’s glasses-free and has opted for a well-worn graphic tee. Of course, the bangs remain as immaculate as ever. “You really don't have to be walking around with low self-esteem in all areas of your life to see it presented in relationships.”

It’s a tough pill to swallow, but as Passick, her agent, notes, people aren’t turning to Turecki for sugarcoating. “She's not trying to coddle you. She’s giving you real information and real advice that reverberates in your brain because her words ring so true,” Passick says.

By the end of the session, Turecki presents me with a series of challenges. She wants me to cut off communication with the guys who I only text for attention purposes, home in on finding a man who’s “intellectual and stable,” and start going places where intellectual and stable men hang out. (If you know where those are, I’m all ears.) “You can literally go up to a cute guy at a restaurant and be like, ‘I have no idea if you're taken or not, but here's my number if you're single,’” she says. “I know that takes a lot of guts, and heterosexual women prefer to be pursued, but it’s stuff that makes people get more of what they want in life.”

In the weeks that follow, Turecki’s advice does reverberate in my brain — I just can’t bring myself to put it into action. Until one day, seemingly out of nowhere, I ignore one of the texts she urged me to stop responding to. And it feels… actually really good to do? “The greatest lesson I learned when my life fell apart 10 years ago was that the only person who can get you out of hell is you,” Turecki says. A no-brainer — and yet? Revolutionary.