Who we are

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We're Elaine Keenan and Neil Power. We're both Family Dispute Resolution Practitioners (FDRPs). Every week we sit down with couples whose marriages have ended and help them work through property, money and parenting arrangements.

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We always ask our clients the reasons their marriages come under pressure and in the responses we see the same patterns repeating again and again. These patterns lead to more than one in three marriages in Australia ending in divorce.

 

We established Before You Say I Do to help couples avoid this fate from the very outset by educating them on how to avoid surprises after the honeymoon. We teach them how to keep the fire burning and how to make sure small concerns don't grow to become issues which could later lead to conflict.

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Elaine has ten years' experience as an FDRP, helping separating couples reach practical agreements about their finances and their children. She's known for her empathetic approach: she listens, she puts people at ease, and she helps them say what they've struggled to say.

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Neil is both an accredited mediator and an FDRP, with more than 25 years experience in finance and investment. Neil understands how finances, assets and debts combine, and why couples so often avoid talking about them. He understands the importance of partners having absolute clarity around expectations before embarking on any venture.​​

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Why we're good at this

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We're good at this because we've heard how marriages end from the inside.

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The biggest challenge we see in struggling couples is a failure to communicate constructively. Rarely is it one dramatic event. It's usually something that could have been talked about years earlier: a money conversation that never happened, different expectations about children or family that nobody said out loud, or a habit of avoiding the hard topics until they became too big to raise. The same patterns turn up again and again, and they're far more predictable than most couples realise.

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We're trained to do what most couples find hardest: get two people talking about difficult subjects calmly, without blame, and without either person feeling ambushed. That's the skill we now teach.

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And we are great believers in marriage. We're not here to put you off, or to predict the worst. We believe the right preparation before the wedding helps you understand what's ahead and gives you the tools to reduce stress and conflict later, so your marriage has the best chance to thrive.

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