What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver

"The course of true love never did run smooth."

As one of my favorite short-story collections, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love never fails to impress me, and the title story, in particular, is one I’ve revisited multiple times over the years. Every time, I’m astounded by how Raymond Carver’s minimalist style manages to say so much with so little. His prose is stripped down to the bare essentials. There are no elaborate plot twists or superfluous descriptions. Just a group of friends sitting around a table, getting drunk, and talking about love. That’s it. A simple premise, yet beneath the surface, there’s layers of meaning, tension, and unspoken emotion.

Carver’s aesthetic minimalism is what makes the story so powerful. The dialogue is natural, unembellished, and flows with an almost hypnotic rhythm. There’s an art to the way he captures casual conversation, making it feel both effortless and meticulously crafted. Carver has fashioned a relaxed, colloquial style. His characters don’t deliver grand monologues or profound declarations; rather, they meander, interrupt, contradict themselves, and repeat things in a way that mirrors real speech. It’s this stark realism and verisimilitude that gives the story (along with many others in this collection) an underlying melancholy. You feel like you’re sitting at that table with them, listening, observing, and, just like them, trying to make sense of the complexities of love.

Mel and Terri dominate the conversation, each presenting conflicting perspectives based on personal experience. Terri, reflecting on her abusive ex, insists that in his own twisted way, he truly loved her. His love was destructive, obsessive, and ultimately led to his suicide, but to her, it was still love: 

|“Sure, it's abnormal in most people's eyes. But he was willing to die for it. He did die for it.”|

Mel, on the other hand, dismisses that notion entirely, believing love should be nurturing and selfless. He tells a story about an elderly couple who, after a car accident, are placed side by side in full-body casts at the hospital. The husband is devastated; not because of his injuries, but because he can’t turn his head to see his wife:

|“Can you imagine? I'm telling you, the man's heart was breaking because he couldn't turn his goddamn head and see his goddamn wife.”|

The beauty of Carver’s writing is that he never forces a conclusion. There’s no definitive answer, no grand revelation. Just a conversation that ebbs and flows, full of contradictions, uncertainties, and lingering silences. The characters wrestle with love’s many forms, from devotion to obsession, from tenderness to violence, yet they never arrive at a single truth. And perhaps that’s the point. Love, like the conversation itself, remains unresolved, elusive, and open to interpretation. By the end of the story, there’s a quiet sense of unease, as if something remains just out of reach. Perhaps an unspoken thought, a realization that never fully takes shape. The characters drink, they talk, they reflect, but they don’t find clarity. Instead, they are left in a dimming room, fading into silence, just as we, the readers, are left with our own unanswered questions.

Love is messy, complicated, full of heartache and contradictions. It can be painful, even destructive, yet we are drawn to it, unable to resist its pull. Why go through with it all? Maybe because love, in all its forms, is what makes us human. Maybe because no matter how much we analyze it, debate it, or try to define it, love remains a mystery—one we’ll never stop trying to understand. And maybe, in the end, that’s what we talk about when we talk about love.