Discussion of Love in Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

In the article “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”, which was written by Raymond Carver in 1981, the author is mainly talking about the story from Mel McGinnis, who is at home with his wife Terri and their friends, Nick and Laura, are drinking gin and tonics and talking about love.

The first discussion is about Terri's ex husband, Ed. Ed is the guy she was with before Mel McGinnis. It is a sad story. She says, that night Ed beat her, he told her, "I love you, I love you, you bitch" while he pulled her around the room. Terri considers that what Ed felt for her was love. And then Terri continues with her story. He stalks Mel and Terri, at that time Mel was divorcing his ex wife and living together with Terri. It’s a really complicated situation. Ed gains knowledge of the true and kills himself with rat poison, but it doesn’t work well at first, finally he kills himself by shooting himself in his mouth. She feels scared during this time, however, she still thinks Ed loves her because he died for love. On the contrary, Mel points out that there is no relationship between love and killing himself and nobody know why he kills himself. The story of Ed is ends and the conversation move on to Laura and Nick’s story. They think they know what love is. Terri tells them to stop the sappy newlywed love, since the honeymoon is going to be over soon.

Let’s turn to Mel’s story. He gives a story of what happened in the hospital to show what true love is. A couple months ago, an old couple who had been in a car accident came into the hospital, Of course, they survived, but the man was badly injured. He is unable to turn his head after car accident, he feels so unhappy, because he will never look at his wife again, who is just beside him....

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... depression may seem no different from ordinary people, but they often feel lonely and depressed. Manic patients are more impulsive and often breaking things, being violent, sometimes might hurt other people. The reason of causing mental illness may be because of genes- internal factors, such as people inherit from their family. In other words, it happened before in this family. Or external factors, long-term pressure or abrupt event, such as natural disasters and accident, and other psychological factors that lead patients to have mental problem.

In conclusion, there are serial reasons that can explain why people misbehave at times. Problem always appears to be easier than that supposes to be. People should not easily make a conclusion through the appearance. We should take the problem into deep consideration, and then find the true answers to address the problem.