The two-body problem is a longstanding open problem going back to the work of Einstein himself. The growing reality of detecting gravitational waves has given this age-old problem a new lease of life. The self-force tackles this problem by using a perturbation of the Einstein field equations in the mass ratio making it ideal to model extreme mass ratio inspirals (EMRIs). If we consider an EMRI system, the smaller black hole can be modelled as a point mass in the Kerr space time - at zero-th order, it follows the geodesic of the background space time but at first order it deviates from this geodesic due to interaction with its own field - which is interpreted as a force, the so-called self-force.

One of the key problems that immediately arises within the self-force model is the divergence of the field of the particle. To resolve this, a specific model of the singular field is employed - the Detweiler-Whiting singular field; this can then be subtracted from the retarded field, leaving a smooth regular field, which (by construction) is wholly responsible for the self-force.

In this talk, we give an overview of the current status of the self-force and how it interplays with other schemes in the goal of black hole binary modelling. We show the construction of the Detweiler-Whiting singular field and how it is employed in all current self-force calculations. We outline the future goals and research directions being pursued by the self-force community and their application to gravitational wave detection.