but it sounds like a phrase used by marriage

“I’ve never heard it, but it sounds like a phrase used by marriage therapists in Malibu,” quipped Janice Min, editor of The Hollywood Reporter.
Pretty close, actually. The term was coined by a Los Angeles therapist and author, Katherine Woodward Thomas, who has created a five-step “Conscious
Uncoupling” online process — to “release the trauma of a breakup, reclaim your power and reinvent your life.”
Speaking by telephone Wednesday from Costa Rica, where she traveled to write her second book — called, not surprisingly, “Conscious Uncoupling” — Thomas
explained that her goal was “to create a map for a couple to consciously complete a relationship — to have an honorable ending.”
Thomas said that the assumption that people will have only one lifetime partner — and that anything else is a failure — comes from a time long ago when the
lifespan was much shorter.
“I’m a fan of marriage, but I recognize that most people in their lives will have two to three longtime relationships — which means one to two breakups.
And so we need to learn how to do this better,” she said.
Thomas said she doesn’t know Paltrow, but applauded what she called her and Martin’s courage in the way they announced their breakup. “They’re modeling
this for the world,” she said.
Not surprisingly, though, the reference evoked some snark, in Hollywood and across the pond in Britain, where the couple is also based.
“What deluded tosh,” headlined a column in The Guardian, using slang for rubbish, or nonsense. (Tosh perhaps, but the phrase actually made it to the House
of Lords, Britain’s upper chamber of Parliament, where a Labour Party lawmaker referred to a political disagreement over university fees on Wednesday as
“yet another example of the coalition’s conscious uncoupling.”)