Quick litmus test: have you heard of Jillian Turecki? It’s quite possibly a good thing if you haven’t. This may mean that your relationship is in rude and blooming health and you’re having sex multiple times a week on different pieces of furniture. Congratulations. Lucky old you.
If you have heard of her, oh dear. You might be a bit sad, and your furniture safe and smear-free, because this means you know—as I’ve recently learned—that Jillian Turecki is the internet’s biggest breakup coach. Or as she’s also been dubbed, the breakup fairy godmother.
I hadn’t come across Turecki until a few months ago when I started following her on Instagram, along with three million others, after my own split, which was very sudden and left me reeling. I cried for a week, took up smoking and, as I tried to get my head around what had happened, I did what many broken hearts do now: I googled things. Some pitiful things (“blindsided breakup explanation”; “how long male dumper come back”); some mad things (“how long Prince William Kate Middleton broken up”). If my search history from this period of time is ever made public, I will have to move to the moon.
This slightly manic googling led me to various relationship experts on Instagram. Blimey, there are a lot of armchair psychologists proffering love life advice on social media these days, some who seem to have bought their certificates on eBay and offer dubious advice (“Want him back? Get a mani pedi!”) in snappy, shouty videos often filmed, inexplicably, in their cars.
I found Turecki among these “experts”. She stood out thanks to her sheer number of devotees—millions on Instagram plus 4.5 million likes on TikTok—and her radiant calm. Imagine Yoga with Adriene, but instead of downward dog videos she’s telling you how to let go of someone. Turecki is a 50-year-old New Yorker who looks at least a decade younger, maybe two decades, offers advice in a slow and contemplative manner, wears aviator spectacles and has truly incredible hair. (Can I ask the breakup fairy godmother what shampoo she uses or is this kind of trivial obsession why I’m still single?)
Her advice isn’t complicated or shouty, either; it’s simple, potentially quite obvious advice about the importance of communicating in relationships, for example, or not chasing after someone who’s “emotionally unavailable,” to use Turecki’s parlance. It’s self-help speak that would potentially make me roll my eyes in more stable times (“Choose the one who chooses you back”), but do you know what? When you have to recalibrate life and a person you thought you knew almost overnight, someone with nice hair calmly offering an explanation for what’s just happened is a lifebelt.
“She’s very grounding,” says a friend who’s followed Turecki since separating from her husband last year after she found out he’d cheated. “Because with infidelity, you can feel like you’re losing your mind. Am I that bad? What the f***? And it was really helpful to have this uncompromising way of talking about things.”
Can I ask the breakup fairy godmother what shampoo she uses or is this kind of trivial obsession why I’m still single?
Another female friend says similar. “There’s so much dysfunctional stuff going on [with dating] that if you’ve been single for a while you can reach a place where you’re tolerating things you shouldn’t. It feels so hard to meet someone that you make allowances. Turecki just talks good sense, and it’s useful to have her reminders on what you should expect in terms of behavior.”
Asides from her Instagram videos and handwritten truisms posted on her grid—”Don’t accept crumbs and convince yourself it’s a meal”—Turecki also has a hit podcast called Jillian on Love, which sits in the podcast rankings alongside other you-go-girl gurus such as Brené Brown and Glennon Doyle. Also, an online “community” called the Conscious Woman, which gives users bonus Turecki content for $67 a month, along with online courses titled, for example, “Where the F*** Is the One?!” Now there’s also her debut book, It Begins with You, which sounds like another Instagram truism but has become her unofficial mantra.
“I think what I believe most is that, more times than not, the person that is standing most in our way is ourselves,” she says, explaining this mantra over Zoom from her apartment in Miami where she’s moved from Brooklyn for the sun, clutching a glass of green juice. “Because we’re human beings and we don’t come with an instruction manual.”
You see? This is exactly the kind of thing that might make you barf if you read it on a motivational poster, and yet such is the serene power of Turecki that I’m sitting behind my computer screen nodding. Maybe I have been standing in my own way? I didn’t come with an instruction manual.
“We’d Only Been Together a Year, but Were Making Long-Term Plans”
I don’t intend to start banging on about my own breakup immediately (I’m supposed to be the professional here, Jillian), and yet somehow I do. She’s encouraging and warm like that. “Tell me your story,” she says, so I explain that I was very besotted and in love with a very wonderful man who suddenly broke up with me in September, without much explanation, and after various sad exchanges in the following weeks sent me a text message saying that I wasn’t physically attractive enough for him and my writing made him wince. It was like being winded as my brain tried to align the man I’d loved so completely with the stranger who could be so malicious. We’d only been together a year, I tell Turecki, but we were making long-term plans. I also got a puppy during our relationship, I add, because my ex was a dog person and about to get one before we met, so I forged ahead in the belief that Dennis, the terrier puppy, would be ours.
Turecki listens. She is also a dog person and has a Boston terrier cross called Sweet Pea, so she’s interested in Dennis before moving on to more trademark Turecki advice—gentle but firm. “Anybody who has the capacity to say those things should not be in your life,” she tells me, before asking whether I’d seen any red flags during the relationship.
I really hadn’t, I insist. That’s why I was so confused by the breakup. It was a magical, wonderful, extraordinarily happy year. Until it suddenly wasn’t.
“Is that true?” she challenges. OK, I accept after a pause, maybe there were one or two things that concerned me, but because I loved him so much and because we were talking about for ever, they didn’t seem like a huge deal. Nobody’s perfect, right? I know I’m not stupid, I go on, but I feel stupid after this. I got it so wrong, and yet I’m 39, not 19. Almost everyone I know is married, and I come from a much divorced family so I know marriage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, but I wouldn’t mind a go at it one day, and I thought maybe this was my turn.
“Yeah, sure, it’s OK,” Turecki says soothingly, as I well up in the interview that’s turned into a therapy session. (Who’s the professional now?) “Look, these things can be subtle, and women in particular value connection so highly that we can overlook certain things. Often, what I’ve found in these circumstances is that there’s a naivety that people can be so cruel or this dark. People tolerate a lot, and then there’s a sort of denial about certain red flags, and we can make a whole lot of justifications.”
In other words, this comes back to Turecki’s mantra: it begins with you. Or me, in this case. If I’m honest, there probably were clues early on in my relationship that it was more complicated than it seemed and so—in Turecki speak—I have to take accountability for them. Again, her advice isn’t that complex or radical: we all have our own wounds and patterns of behavior, as unique as fingerprints but in most cases much more hidden away. She’s just trying to make us understand these behaviors more clearly.
“Why Were You Attracted to Him?”
“Now you can start to see it,” she goes on, in reference to my own situation, “why were you attracted to him? What was it? What needs was he meeting? Was he meeting yours? What needs was he not meeting? So you know, I think you’re gonna learn a tremendous amount.”
Here’s hoping, I joke, because I’m a bit uncomfortable about discussing my needs for too long. Turecki would say that’s something I should work on
Like so many gurus, she became one by going through it herself. Born and raised in New York, with a psychiatrist father who’d fled Poland during the Second World War and a mother who modeled, Turecki had what we now might refer to as a privileged upbringing: she lived on the Upper East Side and went to a private school. She went to two different colleges, and by her late twenties had become a yoga instructor at a hip Brooklyn studio. If you didn’t know she was the world’s biggest breakup coach, you would probably almost certainly guess yoga. (That hair! That skin! She says she’s never had an injection but doesn’t drink, which explains it.) She married at 38, but it was a difficult four-year relationship. One miscarriage, then another on the same day that her husband phoned to say it was over. Turecki’s mother was also dying of lung cancer at the time.
Lost and grief stricken, Turecki became obsessed with trying to understand what makes a relationship work and took a Tony Robbins life-coaching course. Then she started sending out a newsletter to her yoga clients, talking about relationships, sharing her growing understanding of how the body and the mind are linked, and within months had 20,000 readers. Workshops followed; then an Instagram account; now everything else. She attributes much of her success to social media. “With the explosion of the mental health space in social media, people are really hungry for healing. And relationships—all relationships but specifically romantic relationships—is where we experience the most pain.” I nod avidly again. We sure do.
Until recently, Turecki coached clients one on one, but has largely given that up because she’s so busy with her podcast and social media, and now promoting her first book. What’s the end goal, I ask her—becoming a mega-bucks millionaire like Tony Robbins?
‘The goal is to help as many people as possible,” she says sincerely. “To help people love and accept themselves, and to learn the tools of healthy relationships. I would really love to get this into schools.” I wonder how likely it is that the signs you’re dating a narcissist are added to any curriculum in the future, but perhaps it’s not a million miles from mindfulness teaching, which some schools have adopted.
“I Started Letting My Dog Sleep on My Bed”
Turecki is part of a blossoming breakup industry. In this uncertain, post-Covid world where life still feels shaky and dating is deemed to be increasingly impossible, an ecosystem is growing up around it. Going through a divorce or separation? You can book a heartbreak retreat to Utah or California, or be hooked up to a ketamine IV drip in New Mexico which, perhaps unsurprisingly, helps people “detach from the immediate, intense emotional pain.”
Closer to home, you could check in at the Heartbreak Hotel in Norfolk: three nights for $3,000 with therapies including cold water swimming and EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) thrown in. You can subscribe to apps like Mend or Break Up Buddy, which encourage you to journal and listen to advice from AI chatbots. You can find a therapist in seconds online; you can watch endless—and I really do mean endless—videos on social media (“Want him back? Change your hair!”). Business is booming for anyone offering to soothe a broken heart, although we should be grateful that we’re not prescribed enemas to help with the pain, as recommended by 17th-century French physician and possible pervert Jacques Ferrand.
I’ve been through bad breakups before (is there such a thing as a good breakup? Paging Gwyneth Paltrow!), but this one was particularly acute because I was so sure of him. Friends offered all sorts of advice: drink, don’t drink, hot baths, walks, healthy food, chocolate, trashy TV, relationship podcasts, therapy and so on. I bought books with titles that meant I couldn’t read them on the Tube, like A Manual for Heartache and Anxiously Attached: How to Heal and Feel More Secure in Love. I found a great therapist. I started letting Dennis, collected as a puppy just a few months earlier with my ex, sleep on my bed. I took him for extremely long walks. I cried everywhere.
“When we go through a breakup, we go through a temporary insanity, and I mean that very literally,” counsels Turecki. It’s a form of grief that we still don’t take seriously, she adds, before suggesting that people should be offered time off work to cope with it. “Maybe a week, when it first happens. Not every breakup is created equal, but with some your world is truly upside down.”
Can we really call it grief, I counter, saying I feel British and uncomfortable whenever anyone refers to heartbreak as such because it’s not as if anybody’s died.
“You’re grieving someone who’s still alive, and that has its own complexity to it.”
Sometimes maybe you wish they weren’t, I joke. “I’ve thought that, many times, it would be easier if they were dead,” Turecki replies solemnly.
She hasn’t remarried since her divorce 12 years ago, and is single but dating. Ooof, isn’t it intimidating for men to date the breakup fairy godmother?
“I only date men who are very confident in themselves,” says Turecki.
Oh, I reply, immediately wondering if I could pick up this useful skill. How can Turecki tell this? Do these men have a certain hairstyle or wear special shoes?
“Just Keep Practicing What You Need”
“I’m good at reading people, and overall these men have arrived at a place in their life where they have a very clear sense of who they are.” No special shoes, OK, got it. I’d like to meet a man like that, I reply.
“Just keep practicing what you need,” she tells me. This apparently means reflecting proactively on the kind of relationship I want and—dread word—journaling. All the self-help books recommend this, but honestly, who has the energy to pick up a pen when they get into bed at the end of the day?
If you’re going through heartbreak at the moment, I’m so sorry, but what I’ve remembered yet again in the past few months is that it’s just time. Time heals, everyone tells you when you’re sobbing on the floor, and you want to tell them to shove time up their ass. But it’s true.
People like Turecki help, and the fact that we can access them so easily via our phones now is a huge boon, although do be careful of the dodgy ones (“Get him back! Buy a new dress!”). Friends and family help. Books help. Podcasts help. Maybe apps and heartbreak retreats help too. Each to their own in this unique circumstance, says Turecki. Small terrier puppies also help, I’ve learnt, because they force you outside and it’s quite hard to be sad when you’re discussing the merits of chemical castration with another dog walker in the park at 7 a.m. (Although not impossible. “I wonder if men who say they want to spend the rest of their lives with you and then vanish should be chemically castrated?” I remember musing on this walk.)
But time, boringly, remains the thing. In October, in the midst of my sadness, a stranger on Instagram sent me a passage by the author Alain de Botton which I liked very much. “There is an Arabic saying that the soul travels at the pace of a camel,” he writes in his book Essays on Love. “While most of us are led by the strict demands of timetables and diaries, our soul, the seat of the heart, trails nostalgically behind, burdened by the weight of memory. If every love affair adds a certain weight to the camel’s load, then we can expect the soul to slow according to the significance of love’s burden.” Four months on, it feels as if my camel’s slowly catching up again. It’s very welcome back.
Sophia Money-Coutts is a freelance features writer for The Times of London
