True Love Analysis

Ninety percent of Americans marry by the time that they are fifty; however, forty to fifty percent of marriages end in divorce ("Marriage and Divorce"). Love and marriage are said to go hand in hand, so why does true love not persist? True, whole-hearted, and long-lasting love is as difficult to find as a black cat in a coal cellar. Loveless marriages are more common than ever, and the divorce rate reflects this. The forms of love seen between these many marriages is often fleeting. Raymond Carver explores these many forms of love, how they create happiness, sadness, and anything in between, and how they contrast from true love, through his characters in "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love". Four couples are presented: Mel and Terri, Nick and Laura, Ed and Terri, and, most importantly, an unnamed elderly couple; each couple exhibits a variation on the word love.
The couple with which Carver spends a majority of the time exploring is Mel and Terri and their sentimental love. The two "have been together for five years, been married for four." (Carver 154). The form of love between this couple is labeled as sentimental love. Mel and Terri have been together long enough to have gotten past

This old man and woman had been together for quite a while. They had been through thick and then. After the crash, they had been admitted to the hospital at which Mel works at, and they were given a less than likely chance of pulling through. Despite the odds, both of them pulled through, but the old man became depressed (Carver 157). The old man confides in Mel, telling him that he was depressed "because he couldn 't see [his wife] through his eye-holes." Mel continues, " '[T]he man 's heart was breaking because he couldn 't turn his goddamn head and see his goddamn wife." (Carver 158). These two old geezers have true love. They cannot live without one another, for they have true