When We Talk About Love By Raymond Carver

Every love relationship is different somehow. Maybe we love different persons differently. Maybe we love differently. It is hardly difficult to characterize love, and also to put it in words despite the fact that love is a part of our life. People talk about love all the time it is also a general subject among friends. Sometimes they are complaining about it, complaining about their relationship. In a relationship communication is an essential thing. Unfortunately, there are a lot of instances that they don’t talk about it with their partners, and the lack of communication causes much more problems.

The short story titled What We Talk About When We Talk About Love was written by Raymond Carver in 1981. The story has several themes like love,

Seeing the other couple whose relationship is new they do not seem that they are very intimate with each other it seems that they are used to each other through the years. Although he is a totally different type of person, he also thinks about love in a different way. “Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love” (Carver1). From this statement, we can see that he is kind of skeptical about love.

This skepticism can come from a bad experience, for example, a bad marriage. We also learn from the story that he had a wife before called Marjorie and children from the marriage. The marriage ended badly, the relationship with her previous life is not very well. “But sometimes I have a hard time accounting for the fact that I must have loved my first wife too. But I did, I know I did. So I suppose I am like Terri in that regard. Terri and Ed”(Carver 7). We see that once he loved her than this turned into hatred. Marjorie is now living with a man. He even says he hates her so much he would kill

“Mel opened the gin and went around the table with the bottle. “(Carver 6). Alcohol goes through the story keeping up the conversation between the characters. As they all drank the gin we get to the end of the story and the end of the conversation between these couples. “Mel turned his glass over. He spilled it out on the table.”Gin”s gone, ”Mel said.”. (Carver 16).

They tell about their history of love, we get to know some particulars. It seems that the love of Mel and Terri is also a complicated one, from a lot of sides. Their relationship does not seem like a perfect one. They seem like they got used to each other and love is there but it faded like in other cases of their other relationships that ended. Their relationship and also Terri’s abusive one is really that makes us think about what is love. I think Nick and Laura’s example and what Mel thinks what a relationship should be like gives us the 3 most common type of relationships in our