Tennis has had its share of love stories, but few couples let the world in the way Gaël Monfils and Elina Svitolina did. For seven years, “G.E.M.S.” — their shared initials and their shared social media life — was the sport’s favorite romance: the gravity-defying French showman and the iron-willed Ukrainian champion, training together, dancing in lockdown videos, cheering each other on from the player box.
On Monday, October 19, it came to an end. In a joint Instagram post written by Svitolina, the couple announced they are ending their marriage after five years. There was no scandal, no blame, and no third party. There was, instead, a war — and a woman explaining, with unusual honesty, what four and a half years of it have done to her.
The announcement
“This is the most difficult thing I have ever had to share,” Svitolina wrote. “Everyone knows how much Ukraine means to me. What I have rarely spoken about is what the war has done to me inside.”
She described sleepless nights, doubts, and “the feeling of slowly losing myself” — struggles she first hinted at last year, when she stepped away from the tour saying she wasn’t in the right emotional space. Monfils, she wrote, “saw all of it. He never let go of my hand. We fought through this together for a long time, with everything we had.”
“But some battles happen deep inside you,” she continued, “and no amount of love from someone else can win them for you.”
Her conclusion was as gentle as it was final: she needs to find her way back to herself, and she cannot do that within the marriage. She praised Monfils for listening and for respecting her decision “with a strength and grace I will never forget,” and she closed with the line that defines what comes next for both of them: “Skai will always come first. Our marriage is ending, but our family is not. We will always be her parents, side by side, at every step of her life.”
The clarification: “so much more to it”
A day later, on Tuesday, Svitolina posted again — this time to make sure she hadn’t been misunderstood. The war, she explained, was only one of the reasons. “There’s so much more to it, and it was never just about one thing.”
Living through more than four and a half years of war, she said, changes how you see everything: “Your perspective changes, your values and priorities shift, and you begin to understand what you truly want out of life.”
Her clarification also confirmed a piece of news fans had been piecing together: Monfils’ retirement came early because of the split. The 40-year-old had planned to play through the end of the 2026 season as a farewell year, but he cut his season short at the US Open, and the International Tennis Integrity Agency now lists him as retired as of October 5. One of the most entertaining careers in tennis history ended not with a farewell tour, but quietly, in the middle of a family breaking apart.
How G.E.M.S. began
The two had known each other on tour for years before they became a couple in 2018, going public in early 2019. They were opposites in style that somehow fit: Monfils, the Parisian acrobat who treats a tennis court like a stage, and Svitolina, the Odesa-born baseliner whose game is built on discipline, defense, and refusal to yield.
Their relationship was never hidden. During the pandemic lockdowns, their joint videos — choreographed dances, trick shots, home workouts — made them the most visible couple in the sport. It wasn’t all smooth: in February 2021 they announced they were taking a break from the relationship. It lasted weeks. By April 2021, Monfils had proposed, and on July 16, 2021, they married in Geneva, Switzerland, in a celebration that briefly broke tennis social media.
In October 2022, they welcomed their daughter, Skai. Eight months earlier, Russia had invaded Ukraine.
Two careers, intertwined
Monfils retires as one of the defining entertainers of his era. He reached a career-high of world No. 6 in 2016, won 13 ATP titles, and made two Grand Slam semifinals — Roland Garros in 2008 and the US Open in 2016. His athleticism produced some of the most replayed highlights in the sport’s history: sliding splits, leaping smashes, shots hit from positions no coach would ever teach. In January 2025, at 38, he won the title in Auckland to become the oldest ATP champion in nearly half a century — proof that even at the end, the showman could still win.
Svitolina’s career was built on different virtues. She reached No. 3 in the world, won the WTA Finals in 2018, and took Olympic bronze for Ukraine in Tokyo. Her defense and court intelligence made her one of the hardest players on tour to beat for a decade. When she returned from maternity leave in 2023, many expected a farewell lap; instead she produced one of the great comebacks in modern tennis, reaching the Wimbledon semifinals within months of coming back, with Skai traveling with her.
At 32, she is still world No. 6 and still playing. His career is over. Hers continues. That divergence — one stepping off the stage as the other fights on — sits underneath everything about the timing of this announcement.
The war that ran through it all
To understand this breakup, you have to understand what Svitolina has carried since February 24, 2022. She is from Odesa. Her family and friends remained in Ukraine as the invasion unfolded. She became one of the most prominent Ukrainian voices in global sport: pledging prize money to relief efforts, running charitable work through her foundation, and — like her fellow Ukrainian players — refusing to shake hands with Russian and Belarusian opponents, match after match, year after year.
From the outside, she looked indomitable. She has said repeatedly that tennis became her way of fighting for her country — every win a small flag planted. But the cost accumulated quietly: the news from home, the air-raid alerts on her phone, the guilt of being safe while others were not. Last year, it caught up with her, and she stepped away from the court to protect her mental health. Monday’s post was her admitting, publicly, that the damage went deeper than tennis — into the center of her life.
It is worth being precise about what she did not say. She did not blame Monfils. She did not blame the marriage. By every account — including her own — he was the person holding her hand through all of it. Her point was harder and sadder: some of what war does to a person cannot be loved away by anyone.
The last dance
There is an image that will stay with tennis fans. Just two months ago, at the US Open in August, Monfils and Svitolina entered the mixed doubles together — a husband-and-wife team in what would turn out to be the final tournament of his career. They didn’t treat it as an exhibition. They beat the top-ranked doubles team of Henry Patten and Katerina Siniakova in the quarterfinals and reached the semifinals, laughing, chest-bumping, and playing with the joy that made them famous.
Nobody watching knew it was goodbye — to his career, and to them as a couple. In hindsight, it was the perfect final frame: two people who genuinely loved playing together, doing it one last time, side by side.
What comes next
For Monfils, retirement is now official, and the sport owes him a proper farewell — expect tributes whenever he next appears at Roland Garros, where Paris always treated him as one of its own. For Svitolina, the tennis continues: she remains one of the best players in the world, and no one who has watched her career would bet against her channeling this into one more run.
And for the two of them, the work they described on Monday continues in a different form — raising Skai, “side by side, at every step of her life.”
Love means nothing in tennis scoring. Everyone who followed G.E.M.S. knows it meant everything else, too. Some stories don’t end because the love failed. They end because life — and war — asked more of two people than love alone could carry.
Sources: Reuters, USA Today, The Times, New York Post, People.