I’m squarely middle-aged with friends in their 30s through 60s who have made serious relationship commitments that are now experiencing problems. They bend my ear and speak about these issues in three primary ways (I bet you can guess them): lack of communication, lack of emotional intimacy, and financial stress.

These themes come up repeatedly, and I have given advice that’s never really helped. My friends are deeply invested in their relationships, so they have read droves of self-help books, listened to relationship podcasts, worked through relationship-based workbooks, and sought spiritual and professional help. Nothing seems to work!

I began thinking of these relationship priorities—communication, emotional intimacy, and financial well-being—like leaves on a houseplant. If one of these leaves begins to shrivel and brown at the edges, it might benefit from a little direct attention, but we wouldn’t only speak of and address the dying leaf: we would water the plant. Eventually, I realized the issues weren’t really about communication, intimacy, or financial stress, but rather symptoms of a bigger issue: they had forgotten how to care. And, in some cases, they’ve never truly learned how to care about, for, and with self or others.

Care has historically been a feminist project, socially and intellectually. The scholarship of philosophers like Nel Noddings and Carol Gilligan in the 1980s-90s gave shape to the ethics of care. Noddings (1984) argued that care is relational; if whoever the care is directed towards does not feel it, or is not improved by it, then care didn’t happen.

Relationships need similar attention. If you asked my friends and their partners, most of them would agree that they feel cared about because they have continued the basic commitment to being a couple. They feel less cared for and with, but that is not entirely their fault. Aside from service-based care at the beginning and ends of our lives, “self-care” that has been co-opted by capitalist campaigns (think: spa days, treating yourself to an expensive bottle of wine, a new pair of shoes), and healthcare (which doesn’t feel extraordinarily caring to many Americans these days), where else have we been hearing about care?

The self-help industry, predominantly informed by the field of psychology, overwhelming markets one-size fits all solutions (e.g., checklists, habits, behavioral “do this” orders) that tell us what to do rather than helping us develop an understanding of care in the first place.

Edgar Cabanas and Eva Illouz’s (2019) Manufacturing Happy Citizens, argues that self-help social media fails to make a difference because it fundamentally misdiagnoses the user’s problems. A brief video advising an exhausted worker to “just practice mindfulness,” for example, makes zero difference because it leaves the structural source of the stress entirely intact. Instead of fostering collective solutions or institutional changes, it traps the individual in a cyclical loop of self-blame when the “hack” inevitably fails to change their life. This is an example of “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011) or “toxic positivity” (Halberstam 2011), that enforces a norm that individuals should maintain a cheerful disposition to receive care. Social media creates an environment where cruel optimism keeps you running on a treadmill that pulls you backward, while toxic positivity acts as the cultural voice constantly telling you to “smile and enjoy the cardio.”

Of course, social media can be beneficial at times. Staying informed about old classmates’ lives, sharing information with groups who have common interests, and being able to exchange ideas with people who would normally be acquaintances fosters  “weak ties” that may offer its own kind of care (Small 2017). But this may not provide the full emotional support and higher levels of care humans need and receive from face-to-face relationships: the connective labor that sociologist Allison Pugh calls “engine grease for our relationships.” True connection requires a mutual, collaborative effort to see and be seen.

We need to start demanding care, not just in our romantic relationships, but from all of our social contracts. Re-centering care requires us to step off the algorithmic treadmill imposed upon us by social media. Many of us are managing relationships like business partners with a logistics mindset instead of partners with human needs and feelings.  We have learned to speak of “communication issues,” “emotional unavailability,” and “financial problems” without any mention of care. Additionally, we cannot continue to allow self-help programming and self-improvement media to shape our lives without caring about, for and with us.

In practice, this means refusing to view ourselves merely as passive consumers and instead acting as democratic citizens who assert collective control over the industries, media, and economic systems that dictate how we understand care (Tronto 2013). At the end of the day, I know who cares about care—it’s you, me, all of us. We cannot not be concerned about care, since we are human, but we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be distracted from it.

Scott Richardson, Ph.D. is an educational consultant, artist, and founder of The Constellatory.