Tracee Ellis Ross Is Happy, Thanks

“Self-care” might be the most overused term in the wellness industry (quickly followed by “protein” and fast-rising “longevity”). I am not opposed to the idea that you should take time to care for yourself. I do take issue with the fact that self-care is often framed as a temporary escape from your life—a massage, a hike, a meditation session—to reignite your passion. Tell me, what does self-care look like when you love the life you’re living?

Well, just ask Tracee Ellis Ross.

In Audre Lorde’s 1988 essay collection, A Burst of Light, she wrote that “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Lorde was pinpointing the constant self-reliance and self-centering that it takes to survive as a Black lesbian in America in the ’80s, but those same words resonate with me today. Being a happily single Black woman in 2025 (and about 31% of people in this country are single, by the way) can feel like a political statement, especially when pronatalist politicians, tradwives, and misogynist men with podcast mics are streaming through your social media feeds.

Tracee Ellis Ross would likely be reluctant to call herself an activist merely because she has never married. “I’m not interested in [being the poster child for] singledom, because I am looking to meet a partner,” she tells me. “What I don’t mind is being a poster child for living your life on your own terms, for not waiting for partnership to find joy and happiness, for curating and cultivating one’s own sense of self.” But nevertheless, she has become the face of Gen X and millennial single women—albeit inadvertently—just by openly existing as one.

Case in point: Ross, who is 52, and I meet at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City a few weeks after her latest viral soundbyte. During an appearance on Michelle Obama’s IMO podcast, Ross said she dates younger men because “a lot of men my age are steeped in a toxic masculinity and have been raised in a culture where there is a particular way that a relationship looks.”

“The dialogue was fascinating,” she says, referring to the days of online chatter and media write-ups about her statement. “I didn’t say ‘men were toxic.’ I said they were steeped in toxic masculinity because so am I. The same way that we are steeped in a culture of white supremacy. I know the generosity of how I express things. I also know that if I do things wrong, I’m happy to admit it.”

Let me say it clearly: She was not wrong on this one.

We are all indoctrinated into a culture where, for women, marriage equals good and single equals bad. The traditional heterosexual setup—two kids included—is put on a pedestal. That life isn’t wrong. It’s just not the only way to be happy. (Sorry, Vice President Vance, but not all of us “childless cat ladies” are “miserable.”)

Ross is proof of that. She is in the spotlight living a fulfilling life, unashamed of her relationship status. Never waiting for a partner to do the thing—buy the house, start the business, go on the trip. On social media, there’s a meme of the “rich auntie,” the relative who rolls in with designer luggage, oversized sunglasses, red lipstick, and endless tales of adventure. The woman who showers kids with love (and birthday money) before jet-setting off to the next business trip or solo vacation. Ross is the internet’s rich auntie. Most people take “rich” as a sign of net worth, but Ross is also rich in self worth.

“Luxury, to me, is the space to be with oneself, to know oneself, to enjoy your own company, or at least to give yourself space to be in your own company,” she tells me. “I think everyone deserves to find a sense of luxury in their life.”

If that is Ross’s definition of a luxe life, then she is living it. This month, her show Solo Traveling with Tracee Ellis Ross debuts on the Roku Channel. In it, she bounces from Morocco to Mexico to Spain, exemplifying what it’s like to travel alone. When describing the show to me, she explains how it’s about more than just exploring interesting destinations.

“Can you be yourself, by yourself out in the world?” she poses. “It’s one thing to discover who you are, and it’s another to have the courage to be that person. And then it takes even another layer to do that when you’re not in your comfort space. Travel, for me, is a way to give myself a chance to wander, ponder, and be.”

These Solo Traveling trips include basking in pools and spa treatments, shopping local boutiques, wandering through gardens, or sitting down to a 6 p.m. dinner reservation with her iPad—all while wearing colorful clothes. (The many outfits that Ross packs are the supporting actors in this show.) However, any solo traveler knows that it’s not all fabulous. She also shows the monsoon weather, the flight delays, and the food poisoning. And much of the show is self-shot, adding to its intimate energy.

Mostly, as Ross tells me, it’s just her being “a people.”

“Most of the places I go, I’m the most important person in the room,” she explains. “At work, around a conference table, I’m the one people are looking at. Even if I’m on a set, I’m one of the people that everything’s catering towards. I find it a real relief when that’s not the case. I really like being a person among people.”

Strolling through the Rashid Johnson exhibit we’re at the museum to see, Ross feels like one of the people. She walked to meet me in the May heat and was appropriately schvitzed upon arrival. Ross the sweaty people. She paused to read the placards next to the artwork. Ross the curious people. We both make eyes at each other when we recognize the signs of Black life throughout the exhibit, titled “A Poem For Deep Thinkers,” like the copious amounts of raw shea butter. Ross (and Jessica) the Black people. Ross’s people-ing lasts for about 30 minutes. Near the top of the museum, we run into a couple who must stop to praise Ross and her Met Gala look from earlier in the week, which was custom Marc Jacobs. Bam—she’s the center of attention.

Later at a nearby restaurant, she is recognized again. A woman stops, excited that she has spotted a celebrity…the editor in chief of Harper’s Bazaar. Ross politely notes that while she is not Samira Nasr, the two are good friends. We both chuckle when the woman asks, “Are you famous like her?” A woman who has won a Golden Globe and starred in both sitcoms and feature films is, uh, definitely not famous.

Even though the well-meaning woman got it wrong (“I often send Samira pictures of me and I’m like, ‘I’m sorry, why are you in my clothes and in my house?’ Sometimes we look so much alike.”) she was instinctively sure that Ross is not one of the people. It’s hard for a well-known actress to go incognito, even if you can’t quite place her name.

But it’s different when she is abroad.

“Going away by myself is an opportunity to be with it in a beautiful environment that’s not my home. If I’m home, you always find shit to do. It’s like, ‘I need to move that,’ or like, ‘I never cleaned that bag out,’” she says. “Solo travel for me is an opportunity to just really be with myself without the agenda of a schedule.”

And Ross has a packed schedule. In addition to being an actor and executive producing a new show, she has her own beauty company. When I ask what she is most proud of, Pattern is the first thing she mentions. “I built a company out of a dream. And it was 10 years in the making….The vision, it’s beyond my dreams now,” she says. She launched the brand in 2019 with a series of essentials for natural hair, hoping to give women the tools to get their best curls at home. As co-CEO, Ross is very involved with Pattern, and not only as its face—you’ve likely seen her teeth-baring smile and bouncy curls in advertisements, including a recent cocktail-ing commercial with cameos from her former Girlfriends cast members—but as a business mind.

The other thing she lights up about: her home. Ross is a homemaker. Not in the traditional sense—of course, she spends much of her time working outside of the home. But when she is home, she is full-on “nesting.”

She hand-washes many of her clothes. “I have a special bag with the things that I hand-wash and do myself, cashmere and wool. My mom always told me, ‘You can spend money on your clothing if you care for it.’ And I don’t think dry-cleaning means caring for them.” There’s also all the napkins. “I have napkins that I’ve been collecting for years. I used to flea-market,” she says. “If you wash them and then lay them flat, the way you fold them, you don’t have to iron them. It’s my favorite thing to do.”

She has a collection of vases that she arranges fresh flowers in every week. “There’s one flower shop a friend of mine owns. They text me pictures, and then I grab them and do my thing.”

And she makes food for herself. “I always pack lunch wherever I go. I never eat set food…. When I make my meals, I sit down at my table and I take pictures. All my meals are just so pretty. I find that stuff really just fills my soul.”

She rattles off a list of other things that feel homey to her: a bath with magnesium flakes, essential oil, or a load of crystals energized by the full moon (“crystal soup,” she calls it). Natural light flowing through the windows and a view of trees. A good bed with white sheets and pillows hand-stuffed with organic material. And a few more doomsday-prepper essentials, like batteries properly labeled and organized and a gallon of Windex refills.

The word Ross uses to describe this is meticulous. The sense I get is that Ross knows how to take care of herself and puts as much detail into that care as she puts into her job as founder of Pattern and any role she plays on screen. “Knowing how to care for yourself is also how you teach someone how you want to be cared for. I’ve spent a lot of my life getting to know who I am,” she tells me. “[Self-care] is out of necessity in my life. I have a very big life…. I work very hard for the life that I have. My input can never match my output, but it can come close to finding some sense of harmony.” A lot of the spiritual rituals that she employs to care for herself assist in maintaining mental and emotional balance: singing bowls and tuning forks, breathing exercises, or praying in the morning. Some of her other rituals are less about inner work but outer health: Tracy Anderson Method workouts, tongue scraping, dry brushing, lymphatic body massages, and fascia facials.

“The consistency with which I self-care…. I feel like my body, my skin, my face, my soul, my wellbeing, I have a relationship with it that it trusts that I’m going to take care of you,” she says. “My favorite place to be is inside my body, to be present in my skin.” Most of us come into this world cared for, but caring for ourselves is a harder skill to learn. Ross has had 50-plus years to do it, and she started some of that education with her mother, Diana Ross.

“I come from a lot of abundance, but all of the abundance that I enjoy is mine, that I’ve built,” she says. “And building my own life has made me very aware of what my mother built on her own and what it took for her to do that.” Ross takes pride in that she is the “rich man,” as Cher would say.

“[My mom] didn’t build the wealth she has, she didn’t build the career she made because of a man. The example that was set for me [was] that I didn’t need a man to build the life I wanted. It wasn’t, ‘Look at me,’ it was, ‘This is me.’ And that informed something very important for me foundationally.”

In addition to her mother, Ross loved watching strong female characters on TV in the ’70s and ’80s: Wonder Woman, Cagney & Lacey, Carol Burnett, Charlie’s Angels, The Bionic Woman, Kate & Allie. Funny enough, I too can rattle off a series of strong women on TV that molded me. Whitley on A Different World, Maxine Shaw in Living Single, and, of course, Joan Clayton in Girlfriends (played by Ross).

Most of the women on these lists were unmarried, but I can cite double the amount of married women that I watched on TV. Both young Tracee and young Jessica thought they’d be married before 30. Funny enough, even though that milestone came and went, we’ve both worn our “wedding dresses.” “I wore my wedding dress to the first Emmys that I was nominated. It was Ralph Lauren couture,” she says of the 2016 awards show, when she was nominated for her lead role in Black-ish. “And I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I’m marrying my life.’” My wedding-dress moment came at a Southern debutante ball. It was a pure white ballgown that I wore with elbow-length gloves. The same feelings of self-assurance were definitely missing from my 17-year-old coming-of-age experience.

Perhaps this was because the society I was coming out into is one that expects me to be waiting for Prince Charming. Let Ross explain how it works: “Men get to an age where they’re like, ‘Now I’m ready.’ But women, we’re supposed to be waiting the whole time,” she says. “This is not going to be some sweep-me-off-my-feet [moment]. I like where my feet are. I’ve worked very hard to get them underneath me,” she says.

“I want a whole life and I want a real life, and I want a true life, and I want a partner that’s not going to sweep me off my feet, but is going to link arms with me. And that might not happen, and that’s okay.”

That last note: “That’s okay.” That’s the thing my 35-year-old self is just starting to grasp, something thatRoss has seemingly already conquered. “It’s not a reflection [that] I’m a bad person or unlovable,” she says. “I might never get an Emmy. It doesn’t mean I’m not worthy of one. So it doesn’t mean I’m not worthy of a partner.”

As confident as she sounds, Ross’s constant fight against cultural norms also includes fear and anxiety, two very human things to feel even if you are happily single. When I ask her about grief, she recalls a recent run-in with an ex. “I am clear that I was grieving the fantasy of what I thought something was, but it’s grief nonetheless. Because what got ignited is something I wanted,” she says. “Feelings don’t frighten me. They deepen me. They make me more accessible to both myself and to other people. Naming that there is grief around things that I thought were going to be that aren’t is not an admission that something is wrong.”

Ross is adamant that although you can grieve the absence of something, you shouldn’t rely on that something to bring you happiness. “A relationship, my life, my career—none of it is meant to fill the God-sized hole in my heart. That’s for my spiritual practice and my other things.”

Ross is also not writing off partnership all together. She’s clear that she would like to have companionship in her life. However, she won’t be finding it on the apps. “ I already have such an issue with the swipe of life,” she says. “The juxtaposition of horrible things or beautiful things and garbage things all mushed into swiping. I don’t want to put the idea of partnership into that kind of category as if I’m shopping for something.”

At the end of the day, Ross isn’t ever going to be known as so-and-so’s wife. She is an actor, fashion muse, beauty brand founder, friend, homeowner, daughter, aunt, traveler, collector of napkins and vases, homemaker, and artist. “The thing I’m most proud of is the life that I’ve built. And I don’t mean the things that I have. I mean that I am living a life that is a reflection of my insides, that when my head hits the pillow at night, I’m like, ‘I like this.’”

Photographer: Heather Hazzan
Stylist: Dione Davis
Prop stylist: Colin Lytton
Hair: Chuck Amos
Makeup: Romy Soleimani
Manicurist: Maki