Distorting Love

Love is one of those emotions we all feel deeply but can’t pin down. We try to define it, measure it, explain it, yet the harder we push, the more confused we become. Love isn’t something we can quantify or debate into clarity. I believe love is energy that moves through us, and changes form when we no longer feel the same. It can shift into emotions like hate, but it never disappears.

Raymond Carver expresses this truth in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Four people gather at a table with gin and tonics, trying to figure out what love really is, and by the end, they’re more in the dark than when they began. The room grows darker as the conversation deepens, as if trying too hard to define love only creates confusion.

Mel, a cardiologist and former seminarian, speaks first. Nick even jokes that Mel “gets the right” to talk because of his profession, as if having a degree or a spiritual past somehow gives him authority over love. Mel believes that love is absolute and spiritual, but the more he talks (and drinks), the more uncertain he becomes. Love refuses to be pinned down like that. You can’t diagnose it or preach it into meaning. It doesn’t obey logic.

Then Terry tells her story. Her abusive relationship with her ex-husband, Ed is something she still calls love. She feared him, cared for him, and even sat with him as he was dying. When she says he loved her “so much he died for it,” it shows the weight of how trauma effects our experience and interpretation of love and how it can become skewed. This is something I understand. I used to believe I was “in love” during some of the abusive relationships I was in. That’s what it felt like at the time. I felt responsible for their moods, their healing, their everything. Looking back, I wonder if what I thought was love was really codependency. But even then, who’s to say codependency doesn’t contain love? It may be twisted and unsafe, but it still holds its own form of attachment and energy.

In the first part of the story, I wondered how Terry came to choose a stable and quieter love with Mel, but then quickly realized, through his actions, that he reveals himself as a verbally abusive husband. Terry may have thought that she was making a better choice marrying a well-respected cardiologist, but it turns out, he was just more cunning with his abuse, contrasting with Ed's exploding mental illness. To find a healthy relationship, Terry would need to recognize her patterns in how she relates to people. She would have to take a look at her need to fix and make excuses for the men that she chooses, because when a person is used to love that hurts, they don’t always know what to do with love that doesn’t. And sometimes they choose the wrong people simply because the wrong kind of love feels familiar.

Nick and Laura sit on the opposite end of the spectrum. Their love is new, shiny, rooted in physical closeness and easy affection. Nick watches her, touches her hand, leans into her without thinking. He says they’re in love, but they also like each other. Their love is uncomplicated. It’s a different expression of love entirely.

And then there are all the other forms of love, like the love between friends, the love we have for our children, and family members. These bonds carry just as much force, sometimes more. They are their own currents of energy, shaping who we become and how we see the world.

A beautiful love between an elderly couple that Carver presents in the story through Mel's experience, is the lasting kind of love. The kind of love that causes a severely injured man to become restless and depressed because he cannot turn his head to see his wife's face. This kind of love is what most human beings hope for; to grow deeper in love as we grow old together.

By the end of Carver’s story, the four characters sit together in darkness, surrounded by the heaviness of everything that was discussed, the darkness symbolizing that love isn’t meant to be solved, or talked about. It’s meant to move through us, change us, and even heal us.