Celebrity Celebrity Belief & Identity Tracee Ellis Ross Opens Up About Being 'Happily Single' and Childless at 45 "It's sort of fascinating to be 45 and single and childless," the actress said By Natalie Stone Natalie Stone Natalie Stone is a former staff editor at PEOPLE. She left PEOPLE in 2021. People Editorial Guidelines Published on October 4, 2018 06:08PM EDT Tracee Ellis Ross is living her life to the fullest. “It’s sort of fascinating to be 45 and single and childless,” the actress said in a new In Style profile. “Happily single, I should add,” she shared. “Not at home crying about it.” The Black-ish star, 45, may play married, mother of five Rainbow Johnson on the ABC comedy, for which she won a best actress in a TV series, comedy or musical Golden Globe, but she affirms that she’s happy with the life that she’s leading — regardless of the fact that she’s single and without children. Christopher Polk/Getty “These are very big and very personal questions that aren’t anyone’s business but that somehow, like the right to choose, become fodder for public conversation. Some of the ability to reflect on what I really want comes from pushing up against a society that shames me for not having the expected trappings,” she told the outlet. “I’m very pleased with my existence these days,” she added. While she’s happy being alone, she hasn’t been spared of loneliness. Still, she believes she’d experience those emotions even if she had a partner. “Have I had to learn to make friends with loneliness? Yes,” she admitted. “I think if I were in a relationship, it would be the same.” Tracee Ellis Ross Describes Her Fashion Choices as ‘Badass’ and ‘Joyful AF’ Not only she is embracing her singleness, but Ross is celebrating the body that she has and the woman that she is. For her 40th birthday celebration five years ago, Ross rented out a theater, filled it with her friends and undressed down to her bra and underwear. She then pointed out the bodily features she disliked. “I felt like I needed to embrace those parts, and love those parts of me because they were all a part of me and they were beautiful and I have a lot of pride in it,” Ross explained at Chico’s #HowBoldAreYou event at Joe’s Pub in N.Y.C. in March. David Crotty/Patrick McMullan via Getty Now, in her mid-forties, Ross said that she feels “the sexiest and the most beautiful that I’ve ever felt.” “I don’t say I look my most beautiful, I FEEL my most beautiful and that’s what’s really important to me and I talk a lot about it,” she said. She also shared that she has finally become the woman she wanted to be as a child. “You know as a young girl, I had this woman that I dreamt of being, right?” she said. “And I had her in my head and I would play around with being her in my bedroom and with certain people, but the gift of age is that you actually get to have the boldness and the courage to be that woman, to be that person and I’m experiencing it now and some of the things I’ve discovered in knowing myself is that I actually like myself.”