Meg-john And Justin

This week on the podcast we discussed whether self-care was a relationship responsibility and - if so - how we go about doing it. We started with the fact that self-care is very challenging in our current world. It’s either put forward as quite a banal form of pampering which doesn’t require any self-reflection, or it’s put forward as ‘self-improvement’ which suggests that you need to perfect yourself and give yourself a hard time unless you’re doing all the different forms of self-care on top of everything else. We think of self-care more as Audre Lorde spoke of it - as a political act that’s essential, both for surviving these tough times, and for ensuring that we’re part of the solution not part of the problem. In relation to our close intimate relationships, practising self-care is often seen as selfish. Like it would be better to give all of ourselves to our close people and not need to look after ourselves. We talk about how this approach can lead to burn-out, resentment, and having nothing left to o