What We Talk About When We Talk About Love Essay

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We could say that since the begging mankind has strived to understand what love is, we have traversed the emotional waters that divide the great deep abyss of ignorance and the ever comforting comprehension of love. We have willingly climbed to the top of the highest mountains to comprehend pure love. Yet, after so many years, we are left to ourselves to find the answer within our lives. In Raymond Carvers’ “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love,” we clearly see that there are several different notions of love explained as well as portrayed by the characters in the story. Love has an elusive nature due to its ambiguous meaning to those who behold it in its different lights. We can see that the characters of the story all have a bit of understanding, limited in their own way, of what love is. The first character is Mel McGinnis, a cardiologist. He in the story is married to Terri. At the begging of the story Mel seems overbearing and so sure of himself in the topic of love. He initiates the conversation expressing his thoughts on love whilst drinking gin with his friends. Although he may be an expert when it comes to cardiac anatomy, he is no master when it comes to matters of the heart. Mel has a biased point of view when it comes to love as he states “real love was nothing less than spiritual love” (Carver). When he hears Terri’s story about her ex-husband he is quick to correct her saying that it was not love her ex-husband had for her. Terri, Mel McGinnis’s wife, believes love to be something entirely different than what Mel believes. As Terri begins to explain what she thinks love is, she explains the story of her past with her ex- husband named Ed. She describes her relationship with Ed as being very abusive and violent, yet he still loved her. Ed supposedly loved her so much that he in a furious passion beat her and dragged her around his house like

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