What We Talk About When We Talk About Love An excerpt from Readers Digest August, 1997, submitted to Laughter, the Best Medicine, by Adam Christing. A lot of people wonder how you know if you really in love, says comedian Ronnie Shakes. Just ask yourself one question: Would I mind being financially ruined by this person? If you really look at this statement, it is invariably the truth. When it comes to love, money makes no matter, be it past, present or future. Love is love, and nothing can stand in its way. In the following pages I will be discussing Raymond Carvers short story, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. It is a story that explores all types of love, jealous, brutal, physical and spiritual. Written in 1981, it is very contemporary in its style and its meaning can be applied easily to everyday life. Only love that is true in your heart is love, the rest are other emotions sublimated into love. With this in mind, we should look at people around us, people who are in love. Ask to yourself, Why are they in love? Then, ask yourself, How are they in love? It may be surprising, but the answers to these questions can be surpassingly different. Only when they are the same will the love be true. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, is set in a house somewhere in Albuquerque NM, some time in the afternoon or early evening, and going into night. As previously stated, the story was written in 1981, and it appears to set in the same time. Two couples are sitting around the kitchen table, drinking gin, and talking, talking about love and the many forms it takes. Teresa (Terri) gives a detailed description of a brutal love she had with her ex-boyfriend, and how he beat her. Mel, Terris husband, gives us his feeling for his ex-wife, and how he loves his kids, that she has custody of. Jealousy, is the love he has for her, she has his children, and he wishes her dead, so he could have custody. Finally, the love they all agree as the universally truest love, the spiritual love, is shown by an elderly couple involved in a bad accident. Both of them refuse to die, until they can be assured the other will be all right. In the very beginning of the story, the two couples are sitting around drinking and talking. As their conversation goes on it develops into one of love. This passage marks the first of several types of love, and gives us an intuitive
and he does not see it and realize that he loves her also until it is
This is a story of a love at first sight, a love so powerful it
obtain love from something , it is easy and very possible to have love for
The meaning of love cannot be defined in one sentence or even in 16 pages. Every human has his or her own definition of what love is. People define love by their own experiences whether as true love or ending in heartaches. In Raymond Carver’s short story, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, he describes what love is, by depicting what it is not. He executes this by portraying the experiences of four people, while using their dialogue and setting in the story to describe how something so beautiful as love can easily become an awkward and repelling subject to discuss.
The second type of love is between a soldier going home to his wife from the war, where he lost a leg. He loves her too much to burden her with his disability and thinks that she’d be better off without him, but later changes his mind because his love for her exceeds this silly notion and he realizes he couldn’t live without her.
In his story “What We Talk About When We talk About Love,” Raymond Carver expresses his idea of love through his characters and storyline. After reading this story, I am able to connect a type of love with each individual character in the story. Love is taken and given in many different ways, such as affection, gifts, affirmation, or physical time. Carver uses alcohol in his story to spark the conversation about love and also end the conversation about love. The sun is also used to symbolize the coming and going of happiness and love throughout the story. There are three types of love that can be drawn from this story: cynical love, spiritual love, unconditional love, and young love. The title of the story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” gives us great insight on what the subject of the story will mostly be. By looking at the title, we can see that not only are we talking about what it means to love in general, but also what the author truly believes the meaning of love is. Raymond Carver defines different degrees of various forms of love through symbolism in the characters and plot of the story.
Tina Turner, along many artists before and after her, has written songs about love, but what is love? Why do people say they see fireworks when they fall in love? Why do your knees go weak, your palms sweat, your stomach does flip-flops and you begin to stammer when you fall in love? What is it about emotions, including love that seems to effect your entire body, both mentally and physically? Everyday, people talk about feeling happy, feeling sad, feeling anxious...and so on, but what causes emotions, in particular, what causes someone to say they are in love?
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,
The first type of love established in the play is forced love. The story begins with
Love is such a small word that holds such a strong meaning. Many people in their lives, at some point, contemplate about love, dream about it, and even lose sleep over it. Why is it that so many people imagine what love is? This one word, with many meanings, is so problematic to explain and yet it is impossible to live without. The movies in the romance section of this course, each depict a type of love many of us might go through. The first two films, Water for Elephants and How Do You Know, explore the concept of finding love. Whereas, the film Groundhog Day emphasizes the notion one has to become a loving person before one can love. Lastly, The Painted Veil and Stuck Between Stations explores the idea of creating love and seeing goodness in one another. Therefore, all of these films have a specific structure leading us to the notion that love seems to be the center of all things, both in giving and receiving, and can ultimately have many different meanings.
There is perhaps no correct answers to the phenomena of love. It exists in many strata. It is
Love is pure, divine and affection. Henrik Ibsen through his book “A Doll’s House”, shows that love is the basis of life. Through her book The Awakening, Kate Chopin shows that love is not something you find, but love is something that finds you. In the movie The Stepford Wives 1975, Bryan Forbes introduces love as possession. Whereas, in the movie The Stepford Wives 2004, Frank OZ defines love in a distinct way. He shows that true love is when the other person's happiness is more important than your own. In these four texts, A Doll’s House, The Awakening, The Stepford Wives (1975 and 2004), the authors and the directors present the idea that love is the pathway to true happiness.
The Symposium, The Aeneid, and Confessions help demonstrate how the nature of love can be found in several places, whether it is in the mind, the body or the soul. These texts also provide with eye-opening views of love as they adjust our understanding of what love really is. By giving us reformed spectrum of love, one is able to engage in introspective thinking and determine if the things we love are truly worthy of our sentiment.
causes more pain than it does happiness. This concept of love, as portrayed by countless works,
talk, or care for themselves. There is no price tag placed on love. It simply originated