Subscribe to The Modern Relationship Edit on Substack

Modern love, marriage, motherhood, ambition, conflict and culture — and the conversations worth having before something breaks.

For more than a decade, I have spent much of my professional life listening to people tell me how relationships ended.

Sometimes there was a clear moment they could point to — an affair, a betrayal, a conversation that changed everything — but more often the story was quieter than that. It was about the years when the children needed everything, the work that slowly took up more space, the conversations that became logistical rather than intimate, the resentment that sat underneath arguments about laundry or money, the nights spent beside one another but somewhere else entirely, and the strange experience of waking up one day inside a life you built together and realising you no longer quite know how you arrived there.

The longer I worked with relationships and families, the more interested I became in everything that happened before the ending.

Before the affair.

Before the emotional shutdown.

Before the resentment became contempt.

Before someone started imagining another life.

Before two people who once chose one another stopped knowing how to reach each other.

That curiosity became my podcast, Before It Breaks, it became the foundation of my next book, and now it has become The Modern Relationship Edit — my Substack publication dedicated to the complicated, fascinating and often contradictory reality of modern relationships.

A place to talk about relationships properly

We have never had more information about relationships available to us, and yet I am not convinced we have become particularly good at understanding them.

Every day we are given another language for interpreting the person beside us: attachment styles, red flags, green flags, narcissism, emotional unavailability, boundaries, love languages, mental load, toxic behaviour, icks, compatibility, situationships and all the other labels that now form part of the way we talk about love.

Some of that language has been enormously helpful.

It has given people words for things they could once only feel. It has helped people recognise harmful patterns, understand their own behaviour and communicate more clearly about what they need.

But relationships rarely fit neatly into a label.

A difficult year is not always a bad marriage. Boredom is not always incompatibility. Needing space is not always emotional unavailability. Resentment may be telling us something important, but it does not always mean the relationship is over. And sometimes a relationship can look perfectly functional from the outside while two people feel painfully alone inside it.

The Modern Relationship Edit is interested in that grey space.

The place where two things can be true at once.

Where you can love someone and feel disconnected from them.

Where you can have a good relationship and a terrible season.

Where you can fantasise about leaving and not actually want to go.

Where motherhood can bring enormous love into a life while quietly changing the relationship underneath it.

Where work, ambition, technology, friends, social media, AI and the algorithm begin to take up space in relationships that previous generations never had to negotiate.

These are the conversations I want to have properly.

Not in thirty seconds.

Not reduced to a viral rule.

And not with the assumption that every complicated relationship needs an immediate verdict.

What you’ll find inside The Modern Relationship Edit

The publication is built around four recurring editorial series, each exploring modern relationships from a different angle.

Can We Talk About This?

Can We Talk About This? is where I look at the cultural stories, relationship trends and conversations that suddenly seem to be everywhere, from celebrity breakups and dating culture to separate bedrooms, social media, AI relationships, the group chat, modern marriage and the changing language we use to understand love.

The interesting question is rarely only what happened?

It is often why did this particular story make so many of us look at our own lives differently?

Before It Breaks

Before It Breaks is where the writing goes deeper.

These essays explore emotional disconnection, resentment, affairs, intimacy, attachment, communication, motherhood, ambition, conflict, repair and the quieter changes that can take place long before anyone describes a relationship as being in crisis.

It is not about convincing people to stay and it is not about telling people to leave.

It is about understanding what is actually happening before we decide what it means.

Dear Gabriella

Dear Gabriella is the reader advice column for the questions that rarely come with neat answers.

The questions that begin with, “I love him, but…”

The relationship that feels more like roommates than partners.

The person wondering whether they are experiencing a difficult season or a permanent pattern.

The mother who loves her family but no longer knows where she fits inside her own life.

The person thinking about someone else even though technically nothing has happened.

Selected reader dilemmas are explored anonymously, with curiosity rather than judgement and with an understanding that six paragraphs can never tell us everything about a relationship.

The Sunday Edit

The Sunday Edit is where relationships meet everything else.

It is a collection of the research, cultural stories, books, ideas, technology, motherhood, ambition and conversations I have been thinking about during the week, particularly the things that appear to be about one topic but actually tell us something much bigger about the way we are living and connecting now.

Think of it as the Sunday conversation you have once the week has finally quietened enough for you to notice what stayed with you.

Modern relationships are being shaped by more than two people

One of the themes I keep returning to is how crowded relationships have become.

There is the couple, of course, but increasingly there is also the algorithm suggesting what a partner’s behaviour means, the group chat interpreting an argument, social media showing us everybody else’s apparently better relationship, AI helping us communicate and date, work consuming the hours that once belonged to intimacy, and an endless stream of experts, creators and strangers offering opinions about what healthy love is supposed to look like.

That does not make modern relationships worse.

It does make them different.

And I think we need a space where we can talk about those differences with more nuance than much of the internet allows.

Why I returned to Substack

I had written on Substack before, and then life became very full.

The podcast grew. I travelled more. There were television appearances, interviews, speaking, work, children, writing deadlines and a new book to finish, and eventually the kind of writing that did not have an immediate deadline attached to it slipped quietly down the list.

But I kept missing it.

I missed having somewhere to follow an idea all the way through rather than trimming it until it fit a caption.

I missed being able to say, perhaps it is more complicated than that, and then having enough room to explain why.

And as my work has moved increasingly toward understanding what happens inside relationships before they break, it felt like the right time to create a proper home for that thinking.

That home is The Modern Relationship Edit.

Who is Gabriella Pomare?

Gabriella Pomare is an Australian author, speaker, media commentator, podcast host and family lawyer whose work explores modern relationships, communication, conflict, motherhood and the cultural forces shaping how we love.

After more than a decade working closely with relationships and families at some of the most difficult moments of their lives, Gabriella became increasingly interested not only in what happens when relationships end, but in the months and years that precede those endings — the emotional distance, resentment, unmet needs, affairs, identity shifts and changing family dynamics that often develop long before anyone reaches breaking point.

Her first book, The Collaborative Co-Parent, was published internationally in 2025 and has received international recognition, alongside a growing body of awards for Gabriella’s thought leadership and work with families.

Her work has taken her across Australia and the United States for media appearances, speaking, book events and podcast recordings, including appearances across major television and media platforms such as NBC, CBS, FOX, Good Day New York, Good Day LA, Today Extra and The Morning Show.

She is also the creator and host of Before It Breaks, the podcast exploring the conversations we often have too late, and is currently preparing for the release of her next book, Before It Breaks, in 2027.

The Modern Relationship Edit is the written home of that next chapter.

Subscribe to The Modern Relationship Edit

If you are interested in modern relationships, marriage, communication, resentment, emotional disconnection, affairs, motherhood, mental load, ambition, attachment, AI and relationships, social media, dating and modern love, I would love you to join me.

The publication is free to subscribe to, and new editions are delivered directly to your inbox.

Because perhaps we do not need more relationship rules.

Perhaps we need better conversations.

And perhaps some of the most important conversations are the ones we have before we need them.

Subscribe to The Modern Relationship Edit on Substack

Modern love. Marriage. Motherhood. Ambition. Conflict. Culture.

And everything that happens before something breaks.