Nia Bowers
Photo Courtesy of Scott Ehler
A family lawyer turned relationship researcher argues the real story of most breakups isn’t the ending. It’s everything that went quiet first.
For more than a decade, Gabriella Pomare sat across from couples at the exact moment a relationship had already ended. As a family lawyer in Sydney, she negotiated custody arrangements, divided assets, and helped former partners rebuild their lives as co-parents rather than spouses. It is careful, necessary work, done at the point of maximum damage. And it left her with a nagging question that had nothing to do with the law.
What happened in the months, and sometimes years, before that moment arrived?
It is a question that most of the industry built around relationships does not ask, because most of it is organized around endings, not origins. Divorce lawyers appear once the marriage is over. Therapists are frequently called in once resentment has already calcified. Even the language people reach for, red flag, green flag, incompatible, tends to arrive after the fact, applied retroactively to explain something that has already happened rather than to notice something that is happening now.
Pomare’s central claim, developed across her first book, The Collaborative Co-Parent, and now her podcast Before It Breaks, is that this timing is backward. Relationships, she argues, do not usually fail in a single dramatic moment. They fail in a long accumulation of small withdrawals that neither partner bothers to name until it is too late to easily reverse them.
“Most relationships don’t break on the day somebody leaves,” she has said. “Communication becomes logistics. Affection becomes familiarity. Someone stops trying to resolve the argument. One person starts carrying more of the emotional or practical load. You are still doing school drop-off and paying the mortgage and making dinner, but somewhere underneath all of that, you’ve stopped really seeing each other.”
This is not a controversial idea among researchers, even if it rarely shapes how couples actually talk about their own relationships. Longitudinal work from the Gottman Institute has found that the way a couple handles conflict, rather than whether they fight at all, is one of the strongest predictors of whether the relationship survives, with warning signs sometimes visible in a conversation lasting only minutes. Separately, a Pew Research Center study on dating and relationships in the digital age found that roughly half of partnered adults say their significant other is at least sometimes distracted by a cellphone during conversation, a small, ordinary detail that turns out to carry real weight over time. None of this shows up as a single event. It shows up as a pattern, which is exactly why it goes unnoticed for so long.
What distinguishes Pomare’s work from much relationship commentary is her refusal to treat a relationship as a closed system. She is more interested in what surrounds a marriage than in the marriage as an isolated unit.
“I think relationships are affected by everything else happening in our lives,” she has said. “It is almost impossible to talk about a marriage without talking about work. Or children. Or identity. Or money. Or phones. Or exhaustion. Or the people we surround ourselves with. Modern relationships aren’t occurring in a vacuum.”
That framing runs through Before It Breaks, which began as a solo examination of quiet fractures in modern relationships, including the mental load, work functioning as a “third person” inside a marriage, and the effect of social media and artificial intelligence on how couples communicate. Its second season widened into long-form interviews with psychologists, authors, entrepreneurs, and media personalities, recorded across Australia and New York, using their personal stories as a way into larger forces: ambition, burnout, identity, and the tension between who someone is individually and who they become inside a partnership. A third season now adds Dear Gabriella, a segment built entirely from questions listeners are struggling to ask in their own lives.
It would be easy to mistake this body of work for a case for staying together at all costs. It is not. Pomare is unusually direct, for someone in the relationship-advice space, about the limits of repair.
“Not every relationship should stay together,” she has said. “Repair isn’t always the right outcome. But I do think people deserve clarity before making enormous decisions about their lives. Are we incompatible, or have we stopped communicating? Is this a red flag, or something TikTok has taught me to call one? Do I dislike my partner, or am I completely depleted?”
That distinction, between a relationship that has become genuinely incompatible and one that has simply stopped being tended, is where Pomare’s forthcoming second book, Before It Breaks: A Modern Guide to Love, Conflict, Repair and the Conversations That Change Everything, devotes most of its attention. The book moves upstream of her first, into resentment, emotional distance, the mental load, motherhood and identity, emotional affairs, and the particular modern pressure of measuring a private relationship against the curated version of everyone else’s.
Part of what makes that distinction so hard to see clearly, Pomare argues, is the sheer volume of relationship advice now available, most of it generic, much of it algorithmic, and very little of it built for the two specific people trying to apply it.
“We have more relationship advice available to us than any generation that has come before us,” she has said. “But I’m not sure that necessarily means we understand our relationships better. Sometimes there are so many voices telling us what our relationship should look like that we stop listening to the person actually sitting across from us.”
The throughline across the book, the podcast, and whatever Pomare builds next is less a method than a change in timing. Instead of waiting for a relationship to reach the point where a lawyer, a divorce, or a difficult conversation with children becomes necessary, she wants couples to have the harder conversation while there is still something left to work with. Whether that conversation ends in repair or in an honest, informed decision to part ways is, to her, a secondary question. The first question is simply whether anyone noticed early enough to ask it.
About Gabriella Pomare
Gabriella Pomare is a Sydney-based family lawyer, author, and podcast host. Her first book, The Collaborative Co-Parent, was named a Distinguished Favorite at the 2025 NYC Big Book Awards and received further recognition through the International Book Impact Awards. In 2026, she was honored at the American Business Awards for Achievement in Thought Leadership, awarded Bronze in the Thought Leader of the Year category at the Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, and named Most Influential Family Law Changemaker 2026 at the Influential Businesswoman Awards. She hosts the podcast Before It Breaks, and her commentary has appeared on NBC, CBS, FOX, Good Day New York, Today Extra, The Morning Show, The Guardian, The Australian, Forbes, and Mamamia. Her next book, Before It Breaks: A Modern Guide to Love, Conflict, Repair and the Conversations That Change Everything, is forthcoming.
Contact Information:
Gabriella Pomare
Author | Speaker | Lawyer | Podcast Host | Media Commentator
Host: Before It Breaks
Founder: The Collaborative Co-Parent Method / The Modern Relationship Edit
Instagram: @thegabriellapomare
YouTube: Gabriella Pomare
Substack: The Modern Relationship Edit