For the woman whose relationship has just ended and who cannot yet explain what she feels, and for the people who might send her Yemi's way.
“My work with single women has been shaped by both personal experience and professional evolution,” Yemi Majekodunmi wrote in a post this summer. “What began with the loss of a spouse revealed something profound: the emotional landscape of grief mirrors the pain of a long-term relationship breaking down.” The circumstances differ, she went on, and the nervous system answers both with the same shock, ache and disorientation.
She is speaking to a large room. The Office for National Statistics counted 102,678 divorces in England and Wales in 2023, a return to the level seen before the pandemic, and that figure takes no account of the long relationships that end without a decree.
Yemi is a trauma-informed relationship coach and the founder of Business and Marriage Consulting Limited, based in London. She works one to one with professional women aged 38 and over through the emotional impact of a breakup, hosts two podcasts, one for widows and one for women whose relationships have broken down, and brings 27 years of mental health support work to both. The service she wants those women to know about is bespoke and confidential, and it isn’t built around being told to move on. As she put it in a post: “The goal isn’t simply to ‘move on.’ The goal is to come home to yourself.”
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The Person Outside the Circle
Asked whether most breakup advice misses what women need, she declines the premise. “I would not say that most breakup advice misses what women need,” she says. “However, the experience of a relationship breakup is deeply personal. During such a time, many women find it incredibly difficult to understand their own feelings, let alone explain them to someone else.”
What follows from that, in her account, has less to do with the advice than with the person giving it. “The person chosen to support that healing journey must be someone who can be trusted completely, maintain the strictest confidentiality, remain neutral, and offer genuine empathy,” she says. “Ideally, this person should be removed from the individual’s personal circle of friends and family.” Women, she adds, “should also be given the time and space to decide which type of support service best meets their needs.”
That is what she wants this feature to do. Over the next twelve months she wants women “facing loss, confusion, and emotional pain to know that a bespoke, compassionate service is available to help them rebuild their confidence, regain their strength, and rediscover who they are.” Alongside the one-to-one work, she is building a community women can come to “as a valuable source of encouragement, connection, and healing.”
The instinct to protect the mind first came from a career much longer than the coaching practice.
Twenty-Seven Years in Mental Health
Yemi read Sociology and Theology at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, from 1985 to 1988, and later studied psychology at the University of East London’s Stratford campus. Her profile describes her as a mental health and support practitioner with more than 27 years supporting vulnerable adults, families and individuals with complex emotional, psychological and social needs, across health and community settings. The career, as she puts it on her profile, “has spanned direct client support, service management, safeguarding, multidisciplinary collaboration, staff training and the development of innovative approaches to mental health and wellbeing.”
Over those years, she writes, the work “increasingly led me towards one area that sits at the heart of so much emotional wellbeing: relationships, attachment, loss and the patterns we repeat when we are trying to feel loved, safe and connected.” Business and Marriage Consulting Limited dates from 2019 on her profile, with Walking Out of Widowhood alongside it; the coaching of professional single women, in bespoke one-to-ones and group workshops on safeguarding mental health during a breakup, followed from 2020.
What the 27 years taught her, she answers directly.
“My 27 years of experience in the field of mental health have taught me that protecting your mind is paramount. When our minds become vulnerable, we can become more susceptible to emotional fragility and poor decision-making.”
Yemi Majekodunmi, Relationship Coach, Business and Marriage Consulting Limited
“It is important to understand our personal weaknesses and learn how to safeguard ourselves from situations where those vulnerabilities could be exploited,” she says. “Developing emotional resilience, self-awareness, and healthy boundaries is essential for long-term wellbeing.”
Voluntary work runs alongside the practice: pastoral care lead at The Association of Redbridge African Caribbean Communities, life skills coaching with CAP UK, and awareness work for Alzheimer’s Research UK. The coaching itself rests on one distinction.
Chemistry and Emotional Availability
“There is an important difference between chemistry and emotional availability in relationships,” she says. Chemistry, in her description, “is often the excitement and spontaneity of a new romance. It is the mutual attraction, physical connection, and emotional intensity that can leave you feeling swept off your feet.” She cites the relationship researcher Dr John Gottman, whose work, she says, suggests that this initial whirlwind phase typically lasts up to 18 months.
“Emotional availability, however, becomes increasingly important once the initial sparks begin to settle and partners decide to commit to a longer-term relationship,” she says. “It is demonstrated through quality time spent together, being emotionally present, listening attentively, engaging meaningfully, and responding to each other’s needs.” As relationships mature, she adds, it “involves becoming more vulnerable through honest conversations and authentic actions,” and respecting each other’s individuality and room to grow.
Her profile lists the patterns she works with: repeated attraction to emotionally unavailable partners, intense chemistry but emotional inconsistency, anxious and avoidant dynamics, dating that feels exciting at first and then destabilising. “It isn’t a question of intelligence, success or self-awareness,” she writes. “The patterns underneath our relationships can be deeply conditioned.”
Her approach, as she lists it, combines trauma-informed awareness coaching, midlife relationship psychology, attachment and relational pattern work, emotional pattern reconditioning, and conscious dating and relationship decision-making. What it is for, she has stated plainly.
“The goal isn’t simply to ‘find the right partner.’ It is to understand why certain relationships feel so compelling, recognise the difference between chemistry and emotional availability, and develop the capacity to build healthier, more secure relationship patterns.”
Yemi, Relationship Coach, Business and Marriage Consulting Limited
In her practice, that understanding tends to arrive all at once.
The Epiphany
“Our work focuses on supporting single women through periods of emotional transition and loss,” she says. “True progress often occurs when a client experiences what we call an ‘epiphany’: a powerful moment of clarity when something they have struggled to understand suddenly makes sense.”
She gives one example. A client had been separated from her husband for several years. “There were mixed emotions on both sides,” Yemi says, “but certain non-negotiable needs within the relationship had never been met.” Eventually the client decided to reconnect with him. “During that process, she discovered aspects of his behaviour and character that she had previously been unaware of. This realisation led to a profound breakthrough: she recognised that love alone is not always enough to sustain a healthy relationship.”
The lesson Yemi draws from it is a general one. “Human nature often seeks safety in familiarity, even when familiarity may not be in our best interests,” she says. “Her insight allowed her to move forward with greater confidence and self-awareness.” What follows an ending, in her posts, is a question rather than a plan.
Who You Are When You Are Not in a Relationship
Her posts over the summer form a sequence on what comes after a breakup. “One of the quietest consequences of a personal Relationship Breakup/ loss is losing sight of who you are,” she wrote. “For many women, an identity can become intertwined with being someone’s partner, wife, caregiver, or the person holding the relationship together. Then the relationship ends, and suddenly the question becomes: ‘Who am I now?'” The answer, she wrote, “is not found in another relationship. It begins by reconnecting with yourself.”
Another post took on what she called “the loneliness nobody talks about after a Relationship Breakup”: no one to debrief with at the end of the day, no shared weekend plans, no familiar routines. Loneliness, she wrote, “can make the past look better than it really was,” and rebuilding a support network of friends, family, community, colleagues and interests matters because “humans need belonging.” The Community Life Survey for 2024/25 put the share of adults in England who feel lonely often or always at 7%.
“Recovery isn’t about pretending the breakup didn’t hurt. It is about refusing to let the event become the definition of who you are.”
Yemi, Relationship Coach, Business and Marriage Consulting Limited
The rebuilding, in her posts, is a list of questions. What values matter most to you? What strengths did you have before this relationship? What dreams did you put aside? What did you stop doing because of the relationship? “You are allowed to create a new chapter,” she wrote. “You are allowed to discover new strengths. You are allowed to evolve. And you don’t need another person to permit you.”
The faith beneath it is stated plainly. One post closed with a line from the book of Job: “At least there is hope for a tree: if it is cut down, it will sprout again.” Asked who has inspired her most, she says: “I continue to draw inspiration from the life and teachings of Jesus Christ as recorded in the Bible.” And asked what she would like to be remembered for: “helping people understand that the mind can overcome almost any adversity. The key lies in how we train it, nurture it, and direct it.” This year’s work is about reach.
Where Yemi Is Now
She is growing her second podcast, Mastering Love Losses, which she describes as supporting people navigating relationship loss, emotional healing and personal growth. The first is Widow Recovery Secrets; both, she has written, were born from the same understanding, one for widows and one for women navigating relationship breakdowns. Her eBook, Five Mistakes Not to Make After a Toxic Breakup, goes to the mailing list at empoweringwomen.it.com, and a 21-Day Reset Challenge, From Singleness to Dating Success, is, in her words, coming soon.
She is also looking beyond the one-to-one work. In a post from Business and Marriage Consulting she wrote that the practice is “seeking partnerships with organizations that value women’s holistic empowerment”: motivational talks, interactive life-coaching workshops, and access to personalised one-to-one coaching. A summer social at the Redbridge Chamber of Commerce, where she set out to meet at least four new businesses and did, was part of the same push.
Outside the work, she keeps physically fit and makes regular exercise a priority, and the personal value she names first is “being punctual and respecting other people’s time.” Her most memorable experience, she says, was “opening an office space that was unknowingly filled with leaking gas,” which she calls “certainly a memorable and sobering experience.” In a September post, after a week off in which she baked a recipe she hadn’t made in years, she wrote that “September has always been my month of HUGE FAVOUR,” and that she was entering it expectant.
The line that recurs across her posts, in one form or another, is the one she closed with in August. “Sometimes, the most important relationship you rebuild after a Breakup, is the one you have with yourself.”
Five Reflections from Yemi
Through whose eyes are you measuring yourself? Someone’s decision to leave does not determine your value.
Is it chemistry, or emotional availability? The first is the whirlwind; the second is what is left once the sparks settle.
When does checking in become overthinking? Healthy relationships don’t require constant second-guessing.
What did you stop doing because of the relationship? Return to your interests, reconnect with trusted friends, learn something new.
What matters to you now? You are allowed to create a new chapter, and you don’t need another person to permit you.
From the Diary of Yemi Majekodunmi
Yemi Majekodunmi is a London-based trauma-informed relationship coach and the founder of Business and Marriage Consulting Limited.
| Role | Trauma-Informed Relationship Coach, Mental Health Consultant and Podcast Host |
| Based in | London, United Kingdom |
| Also with | Pastoral Care Lead, The Association of Redbridge African Caribbean Communities (TARACC) |
“The goal isn’t simply to move on. The goal is to come home to yourself.”
Editor’s Note
Executives Diary features Yemi Majekodunmi because the practice she runs was built from the two things she names, the loss of a spouse and 27 years of mental health support work, and she describes both at the level she holds them. Her answers decline to overstate: asked whether breakup advice fails women, she says it does not, and turns the question to who should be trusted with the healing. The distinction between chemistry and emotional availability is argued in her own terms rather than asserted. The client story she supplies has no hero in it.
Executives Diary, Editorial
