What I Am About When We Talk About Love By Raymond Carver Essay

Through life, people experience many kinds of love. Many people often believe they love someone, when they actually do not because they may not know what the word means. As much as we want to understand love, it is still simply indescribable. As C.S. Lewis tries to explain it in his book, The Four Loves, it is still a mystery as to what love truly means. I believe in order to know what love means, one must experience it. It is quite true that went two individuals are in love with each other, they know it and can feel it. No matter how much love is studied and looked at, every individual must experience it to understand it. Along with this love lies circumstances which lead

Love is a powerful emotion that every human being has experience at least once in their life. There are numerous connotations that refer to this emotion, but there is only one kind of love that can make a person change completely in unexpected ways. It is the kind of love that consumes the soul and everything within. Mixed with excitement, adventure, heartbreak, happiness and joy; it is a big ball of feelings, all concentrated in one simple, yet extremely complicated necessity to have, protect, please and give all of oneself to that one person. In certain occasions, love can grow very intense and, consequently,

The human idea of love is quite possibly the most misunderstood in today’s society. Love can be between a man and woman, mother/father and their kids, or even really good friends. However, these relationships of love go through many interactions and stages to start and progress. Many psychological events must occur and be worked through in order to be successful. All relationships must endure the five perspectives of human behavior. These perspectives are biological, learning, social and cultural, cognitive, and psychodynamic influences.

Love is undoubtedly one of the most frequently explored subjects in the literary world. Whether the focus is a confession of love, criticism of love, tale of love, or simply a tale about what love is, such literary pieces force readers to question the true meaning and value of love. Raymond Carver accomplishes this in his short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” As the unadorned setting and the personality of each character unfold, the reader realizes that Carver is making a grave comment on the existence of love. Carver utilizes strong contrast, imagery, and diction to ultimately suggest that love cannot be defined concretely and therefore cannot be defined in words, and because of this, it is better off unexplored.

Love is a feeling that cannot be defined in words. It’s an expression; an unsolicited expression. It is a feeling that comes in our heart in an unanticipated manner. It is indeed an expression which never follows the laws of nature. The passions seems to be inflated when someone happens to fall in love. Love is unpredictable, it cannot be justified, but can just be intensified.

Love is said to be one of the most desired things in life. People long for it, search for it, and crave it. It can come in the form of partners, friends, or just simply family. To some, love is something of a necessity in life, where some would rather turn a cold shoulder to it. Love can be the mixture of passion, need, lust, loyalty, and blood. Love can be extraordinary and breathtaking. Love being held so high can also be dangerous. Love can drive people to numerous mad things with it dangerously so full of craze and passion.

Love is said to be the greatest human experience in which mankind are privilege to partake in. To love can be a wondrous experience filling life with bliss and other strong emotions. Some people believe to love is to be alive and be able to see the good in the world and others. The purpose of this paper is to examine and find a better understanding of what is love, to explore what people believe love to be, and what lies surround the perception of love and to explore and expose what the meaning true love is or at the very least the authors understanding of the perception of love. In addition to exploring the concept, deception and the truth of love,

Love cannot be defined in one sentence or even a paragraph. Every human has his or her own definition of love because people usually define love based on their cultures, backgrounds, social classes, educations, and their societies. In this essay, the main point will be the different kinds of love that Carver illustrates in his story “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love.” In Carver’s story, there are some points that I can relate to my personal experience. There are a few characteristics and symbols in the story that are really important to understand in order to define what a real love is and find the intention thrown out the story. These characteristics includes, Mel, Terri and Ed and Terri’s relationship. Furthermore, symbols

While people are often able to identify when they feel the emotion love, love itself seems to defy definition.  In her polemic “Against Love”, Laura Kipnis argues that love cannot exist as traditional expressions of love such as marriage, monogamy, and mutuality.  However, in her argument, she defines love incorrectly by equating love to expressions of love. This definition lacks a component essential to understanding the abstract concept of love: emotion. Recognizing love as emotion helps us realize that, contrary to Kipnis’ argument love by nature transcends all expressions of love. Love is subjective and exists in any and all forms. In her argument that love cannot survive as conventional expressions of love, Kipnis ignores the nature of love as emotion in favor of equating love to different expressions of love. Love is a force which exists above expressions of love; a true understanding of love can only come from an assessment of how individuals, not societies, respond to the emotion.

Love has many different meanings to different people. For a child, love is what he or she feels for his mommy and daddy. To teenage boy, love is what he should feel for his girlfriend of the moment, only because she says she loves him. But as we get older and "wiser," love becomes more and more confusing. Along with poets and philosophers, people have been trying to answer that age-old question for centuries: What is love?

What is love? Love can come from that of a friendship, a romantic relationship, the unconditional love that God has for one, or simply one person adoring another. These are all considered, in one form or another, love. However, as Mel McGinnis has asked: “what do any of us really know about love?” (333). Is love real, or is it just a figment of our imagination? What does the word LOVE even mean? The indefinability of love is the overlaying theme in the story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” written by Raymond Carver. This story focuses on the examples two couples, Mel and Terri, and their newlywed friends Laura and Nick, use to discuss the meaning of love. While sitting around a kitchen table drinking a bottle of gin, the two pairs discuss what love is as the day passes them by, and although they never reach a consensus, they do provide excellent examples allowing the reader to draw conclusions on the meaning of love. However, as the theme suggests, no matter the amount of examples or time spent trying to figure it out, love can never be given one general definition because there are many different interpretations of what love actually is. This is a great take away point for college students to learn because college is where students are trying to find the meaning of love and life. Through characterizations and ironic situations, love can be broken down in to two different categories of unconditional and conditional love, and while this story mostly covers

In Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” two couples sit around a dinner table telling stories of love once had and the current love they hold. Through their stories, they try to define what love is, having different viewpoints based on experience. The short story “Sexy” written by Jhumpa Lahiri has reserved character, Miranda meets a married man named Dev. They soon begin their affair but throughout it, Miranda begins to question the kind of feelings Dev truly has for her. At one point, he calls her ‘sexy’ but it was interpreted as loving someone you don’t know. After Laxmi’s young nephew defines it for her, she soon ends her relationship with Dev. In both stories an attempt to define love and what it is to love a

Love is difficult to define, difficult to measure, and difficult to understand. Love is what great writers write about, great singers sing about, and great philosophers ponder. Love is a powerful emotion, for which there is no wrong definition, for it suits each and every person differently. Whether love is between family, friends, or lovers, it is an overwhelming emotion that can be experienced in many different ways.

Like I mentioned in the paragraph above love is usually defined as an intensive feeling of a deep romantic or sexual attachment to someone, however love is a bit more complicated than that. Love is special, it’s unique in it’s attitude and behavioral components, it’s a phenomenon that eludes easy definition (Our Sexuality, 2012). Love has always been a complicated subject; sometimes love is fickle, sometimes love isn’t love, but rather pure infatuation. Infatuation is often mistaken for love, however it is only a short lived but intense passion for someone. It’s possible that since many infatuations are mistaken love that many researches regarding the measurements of love would include individuals infatuated with each other. In one possible case, a man named Zick Rubin wished to measure love and liking. He set up 13 questions

In the story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” by Raymond Carver tells of how two couples gather around a kitchen table drinking gin and talking about love. For some odd reason, no one knows what love is. One character in the story, Mel says it is “spiritual” or absolute”, trying to perceive what it truly is. The characters talk and tell stories about their own experiences in what it meant to them. The only problem was that no one could tell wrong from right on what it meant. Towards the end of the story, after a couple of rounds of gin, both couples sat in complete darkness and silence, motionless as if they were hit in a daze. This puzzled the couples for some time to question their own love towards one another in their life. The true meaning of it is still unknown. In order for the reader to have a proper understanding of the story, they must bear in mind that the “presence of light” shows a personified attribute to love being in the room with them and to understand the dark awakening at the end of the story.