104: Love-Ability

Speaker 1 (00:00):
How to make love. Now, is that from recipe or from scratch? This is
Speaker 2 (00:12):
How to make love. Wow. Oh gosh. Oh my God. Yeah. A little to the left and faster. A show that tests the edges of what love is, worthiness, empathy, beauty, sex, positive, the borders, it can cross how we do integrity in all of our relationships, and its hidden costs and
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Shadows. In a world where we other people, where we build walls, we just tear down walls,
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Fuck finding it or falling into it. Our future depends on making it. Hey everybody, welcome to How to Make Love and Podcast designed to grow your love, justice, and courage. Muscles. I’m laura and welcome back, or welcome for the first time perhaps you are in very, very fine company. Two things right up front. Number one, you might hear a little bit of a difference in my sound quality, and that is because I'm on the road and I'm not using and traveling with all the fancy beeps and boops and bops. So just a heads up, bear with me. And number two, today I want to hit you with the he as Missy misdemeanor. Elliot says, I don't actually know for sure what she means by that, but since she's the boss, I assume she means hit you with a zinger. So that's what I want to do.

laura brewer (01:24):
I want to talk to you about lovability and being lovable, but I want to flip it on its head, or again, in the words of my good friend Missy, put my fang down, flip it and reverse it. So in our culture, lovability is a thing, right? We use the word lovable a lot. What makes someone lovable? What makes you lovable? And many of us have formed some significant insecurities from societal and personal wounds about whether or not we are lovable. Can we be loved, accepted, good enough, worthy? All of those really human fears and worries get locked into the concept of lovability. And it makes me sad for a whole bunch of reasons, but primarily because I think we've misunderstood the word. I think we mispronounce the word. I think we fundamentally have the word wrong, and I want to turn lovable into being love able.
l
aura brewer (02:09):
I think it's actually really, really, really important. And let me tell you why. When we're focused on lovability in terms of are we lovable, we make this concept very passive. It's like we're searching in the desert for water. Will we find it? Will we die trying? Who knows? When we treat the word that way, we walk around questioning our worth. As in are we lovable questioning other people's worths as in are they lovable? And I can't really come up with one good reason why understanding the word that way is helpful at all. It seems that the only way the word can be used in that iteration is as an evaluative tool, as in using its determine whether we are others are worthy of love or capable being loved or a value in a lovable way to others. And that sounds truly fucking awful to me.

laura brewer (02:53):
But I'm really stretching myself to try to find a single useful notion that comes from treating the word lovable in the way that we have typically used it. And I honestly, I can't find one if we wanted to use the word in positive ways as in to declare innately that everyone is lovable or as a reminder to ourself that we are lovable. There could be some value in that. But the problem I see is that in order to have that word have value as a positive notion, it requires the connotation of the negative. We wouldn't need to remind ourselves that we're lovable if there wasn't some kind of question as to whether or not we are. We could also try to use the word and decolonize it and use it to try to challenge the racist capitalist standards of beauty or worth or value in our society.

laura brewer (03:37):
And I strongly recommend that you do that if you choose to use the word lovable, that you use it in ways that challenge the arbitrary hierarchies in our society. And also while that's important, it would be pushing back against a current existing force and connotation of not enoughness of lack. And so I'm just left with this word doesn't serve us, and yet it is so deeply embedded into our lingo and our language and our culture. I would like to give you a different use of the word, a different part of speech, a different pronunciation and a different concept entirely. I would like to offer that instead of being lovable, you aim to be love able.
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aura brewer (04:26):
This entire podcast is about learning to make the things we value, right? Namely love, namely a just love. Instead of spending time wondering about whether or not you are lovable, what if instead you wondered to what extent and in what ways you are love able, what does that mean really? Well, since it's a new way of thinking, you impart get to decide. What it means to me personally is that love is a muscle and instead of thinking about ability as something that you have or don't have, I want you to think about able as in what kind of shape is our muscle in where and how is it really skilled at loving or how might it like to love in a way that it currently doesn't? Notice I'm not saying can or can't. I know this new connotation has the word able in here, but to prevent this from becoming able list, we're not going to bake in some sort of definition around what's normal or not.

laura brewer (05:11):
We're not going to center some person or group or people in this to define what's ideal or right. We're not going to exclude anyone from being a part of this connotation. We're not going to medicalize or pathologize. We're not going to deny anyone independent agency to assess their own love abilities or participate or self determine. This is a universal invitation into a different way of thinking and being and understanding. Now that I've talked a little bit about why thinking about being a lovable in the status quo way is unsupportive at best and harmful at worst, I want to dive into shifting from lovable to love ability and to discuss why it's not only more helpful but actually transformative. And I'm going to make my strongest case possible to hopefully convince you to wildly and permanently shift your understanding and use of this word. But let's see how I do.

laura brewer (05:57):
Let me give you a few reasons that I think switching to this notion of love, ability away from lovability is really, really, really important. So reason number one, I want us to make the switch from the old way to this new way. The old lovability is rooted in judgment, whereas the new love ability is rooted in action. So lemme explain. When we think about being lovable, the old way, we place ourselves in a position of passivity where we can wait for external validation. It's fundamentally about whether someone else decides that we are worthy of love, which means our sense of self-worth is always in someone else's hands and it asks us to sometimes perform to meet societal standards of beauty or desirability or even compliance to uphold these really harmful societal expectations. But by shifting to love ability, we can reclaim our power. It's no longer about whether we are worthy of love, but how we are actively engaging in loving love ability puts the focus on our capacity to act in love, making it something that we do, not something we seek.

laura brewer (06:57):
It's not an external need for approval, it's an internal generative power that we can continuously hone and develop. It fuels our agency to make different sorts of decisions and see the world in different sorts of ways that we choose for ourself. I think that's really compelling. The second reason I want us to make the switch is because lovability reinforces perfectionism, whereas Loveability embraces, I think imperfection the question, am I lovable? Often traps us in a cycle of perfectionism whether we realize it or not, because we start to believe that in order to be lovable, we need to be flawless or avoid making mistakes or fits some kind of ideal mold that often feels out of reach and is legitimately often out of reach. Particularly for marginalized people, this pressure can often erode our sense of self. And what's even worse, it can lead us to be jerks and judge others who don't meet these same stupid standards.

laura brewer (07:45):
So on the other hand, love ability acknowledges that love is a practice and a practice is inherently imperfect just like any other muscle. Our love ability grows through failure, through getting it wrong, through trying again. And when we focus on love ability, we're free to embrace our humanity in a way that I don't think we can with being lovable. It allows us to embrace our flaws, our complexities, our growth. It invites compassion both for ourselves and for others because it reminds us that love isn't contingent on getting it right every single time. In fact, love is built precisely through those sorts of moments where we get it wrong and we come back to the practice anyway, okay, stick with me a few more reasons. The third reason I want you to make the switch is because being lovable is all up in scarcity, whereas being love able cultivates a sense of no limitations.

laura brewer (08:31):
When we question if we're lovable, we're operating from a scarcity mindset. It implies that love is limited, that only certain people can access it, that there's only so much to go around, and that scarcity approach tends to pit us against one another. If you're lovable, maybe that means I'm not, we're kind of constantly measuring ourselves against others and this sort of arbitrary scale of enoughness. But love ability, love able shifts the framework because when we focus on being love able, we're not in competition with anyone. Love is a muscle that grows the more we use it, it's a strength. It isn't contingent on taking it away from anyone else. In fact, the more we practice love toward ourselves and toward others and toward the world, the more there is for everybody. I'd argue love ability allows us to approach love from a place of limitlessness rather than fear.

laura brewer (09:16):
And I think that's real sexy. Two more reasons for you to make the switch. Lovability centers worth on the self, whereas love ability centers on the collective or it can, the obsession with lovability is inherently individualistic. It's all about me. Am I lovable? Do I deserve love? Am I enough for others? And it keeps the focus on my personal worth and individual performance, and I think it can kind of pull us away from the larger collective responsibility of love. But lovability flips the script. It asks not just how am I loved, but how am I loving others? It transforms love from something we hope to get into something we actively give, and I think that's really, really fucking powerful when we are focused on love ability. We're also considering how we show up in relationships, communities, movements, it moves, love from this self-focused question to a community centered practice.

laura brewer (10:05):
If we let it emphasizing our personal unique responsibility in making the world a more just and compassionate place to be. I think love ability can actually ask us to engage in love as a way of dismantling systems of oppression rather than that old lovability where we just seek personal validation within those systems and do not challenge them. Last reason, number five. Lovability I believe can stall personal growth. I believe that is an old concept that's not going to help us move forward. Whereas lovability can encourage our evolution and our development. Lovability leaves us stuck because we're always asking, am I lovable? And we don't actually get to move forward if we find that we are not or we decide that we're not. We wait for someone else to tell us that we're enough. And even if they do, we're sort of still left with this fear that that answer might change tomorrow.

laura brewer (10:53):
Whereas love ability, again focusing on the muscle, focusing on the practice, has the potential to propel us forward. It's an active pursuit. It is a verb that implies movement and growth. When we embrace love ability, we ask ourselves, how can I stretch? How can I love more fully, more bravely, more expansively? It encourages us to develop new ways of loving that we haven't even discovered yet, and to evolve in our capacity for care and compassion. And of course, I'm going to argue to challenge ourselves to love in ways that promote justice and equity and liberation. So hot. I mean, really I think divesting from being lovable and having that be a question that we hold and a word that we use and investing in being love able, really thinking about to what extent am I able to love in radical ways? I think that could be a game changer for us individually, for us as a community, as a collective, and for the greater communities that surround us.

laura brewer (11:45):
So if we take this new way of thinking seriously that our job isn't to be lovable, but rather to be love able, we need to ask ourselves some real questions. Questions that can actually move us and grow us and change us. So go get the transcript of this episode so that you can get your homework on. I'm going to give you the questions here, but you can look them up and spend some time with them when you download the transcript. Number one, where do I actively practice love in my life and where do I withhold it? And I want you to expand on that a bit. So I'm going to ask you a few more follow up questions for this question. Number one, this theme. Number one, what reasons or beliefs lead me to offer love in some places and not in others? And how does this reflect my current love ability and what would it look like to expand my capacity for love in the areas where I'm currently holding back?

laura brewer (12:27):
That's all question number one, theme number one, question theme. Number two, how is my understanding of love ability shaped by the systems around me? I'm going to again ask you some little mini follow-up questions around that theme. In what ways do societal expectations like capitalism or beauty standards or productivity culture, all that kind of stuff, what kind ways do those expectations limit my perception of how I am capable of loving? What would it look like for me to step away from some of those societal expectations to divest from them and power? Does that shift my own perception of how capable I am of loving or how skillful I am at loving? Next, question three, what are the edges of my lovability? Where do I struggle most with offering love? Whether it's to myself or to others or within my community? How might I lean into this discomfort as an opportunity for growth?

laura brewer (13:14):
Are there specific actions I can take to strengthen my love ability in these challenging areas a little bit more. And the last question or theme here, how does my love ability, how could my love ability contribute to collective liberation? And I really want you to think about this vis-a-vis being lovable. But in this new definition, in what ways does the love I practice actively challenge oppressive systems or create more equitable relationships or contribute to more reciprocally supportive communities? Where might my lovability need to evolve in order to be in greater alignment with my values for justice and courage and liberation? Okay, here's the thing. Love, justice, courage. They're not magic. They're acts. And because they're acts, we can always practice them. We can improve, we can deep and we can expand, but we have to be honest with ourselves about where we're not practicing the things we want to be practicing and ask, what would it take to expand my love ability there? What would it take to grow my muscles, to grow how love able I am, and how I move around in the world? Maybe it's being more patient with yourself. Maybe it's becoming a better listener to other people. Or maybe it's learning how to love in ways that challenge your privilege or your comfort. I'd love for you to take a week and think about your own love abilities, where they're strong, where they need some attention. Use the questions I've left you with. There is a lot to think about from this episode.

laura brewer (14:50):
Unlike whether or not you are lovable, love ability isn't a finish line, it's a journey. And great news, you're already on it. You've been on it. Now, how do we make it a more exciting journey, a more impactful journey, a more expansive journey? If you have questions or you want to engage me in this conversation, or you've got questions about this notion of love, ability, or being love able versus being lovable, give me a holler. And don't forget, use the links in the show notes, download the transcript, use it as a study guide. Let me know what you need. Thanks for tuning in my friends. I hope you'll stretch yourself a little bit, grow that lovability muscle. I'll be doing the same right alongside you, and I'll see you again here next month. Bye for now. Boost.