As the text demonstrates, however, Terri can support her argument only through a series of unconvincing “okays” and “maybes”- both of which point more to doubt than to the affirmation that Terri so obviously and so desperately seeks. Terri tries to justify the negative aspects of a relationship long since passed by insisting that it had been founded on love. In his own way, maybe, but he loved me” (138). More important, Terri attempts to convince Mel, her new husband, that her past marriage to Ed was actually based on real love: “Sure, sometimes he acted crazy. In a detailed account, Terri describes the way Ed, her “ex,” would beat her and drag her around the room, all the while professing his love for her. The first account comes from Terri, who had at one point been the victim of an abusive relationship. The story begins as four friends sit around a table, downing cheap gin and engaging in a discussion about their relationships, both past and present.

By juxtaposing Terri and Ed’s past relationship with Laura and Nick’s current one, Carver demonstrates that the right kind of love can both create good feelings and fill in the gaps that abusive love has caused. Carver’s “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love,” however, causes the reader to reconsider this notion and instead consider the possibility that there is also an evil, empty type of love that counters the positive. In this regard, love is the ultimate dream because it is so frequently associated with self-completion. In conceiving the story, Carver apparently assumes that many of his readers were raised on the notion of fairy tale love. Raymond Carver’s short story “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love” looks at love through two very different lenses. Analysis of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk about When We Talk about Love

Raymond carver what we talk about love