What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

by

Raymond Carver

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Themes and Colors
The Nature of Love Theme Icon
Love and Violence Theme Icon
The Failure of Language Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.

The Nature of Love

In “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” two married couples spend an afternoon together drinking gin and debating the nature of love. Initially, they all believe that they know exactly what love is, and they feel certain that their own marriages are loving. However, as they struggle to define and defend their ideas about love, the conversation devolves into uncertainty and disagreement. Their heated (and at times cruel) debate, along with their…

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Love and Violence

At the beginning of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” Mel McGinnis—a heart surgeon—insists that love and violence cannot coexist: “The kind of love I’m talking about, you don’t try to kill people,” he says. But the remainder of the story contradicts him. As the couples discuss love, they constantly invoke violence: Mel’s wife, Terri, believes that violence can prove the existence of love; Mel reveals his own violent fantasies…

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The Failure of Language

The title “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” implies that language will play a central role in this story: for its duration, the four characters are in conversation with one another, trying to define the meaning of love. However, they struggle to clarify what love means—it’s a complex phenomenon, and language seems inadequate to describe love (or anything else). Over the course of the story, language continually fails: the characters misspeak, miscommunicate…

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