In five pages What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is the primary focus of how this compilation represents Raymond Carver's views on family. Two sources are cited in the bibliography.
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was a song that talked about the futility of married life, the scars hidden in families and the way that one heard it should be--marriage and family--is not necessarily good.
The 1960s saw a sexual revolution and a challenge of family life. Indeed, while the nuclear family is put on a pedestal today, few families are intact first families where
the parents were never married before. More often than not, there are stepchildren and stepparents, something that indicates that monogamy does not really work. Yet, the theory that marriage is
good continues to permeate life and one has to wonder whether or not there are underlying reasons. Some theorize that the initial reason for the eruption of the nuclear family
had more to do with capitalism than it did with love. Sociologist Judith Stacey contends that the family is really just a modern Western concept and only in
modern times has the concept come to be associated with the nuclear family alone (38). One should be suspicious of a term that denotes specified roles such as a mom
who is the caregiver, the dad who is the breadwinner and children to be cared for. Obviously, the world consists of people who are very young and very old and
this paradigm really only involves an individuals life for an eighteen year time span. For example, people live to be about 80 and only about 20 years-- or one fourth
of their lives-- are devoted to rearing children, something that typifies the modern American family. Thus, the remaining years are considered void, or at least outside of the desirable paradigm.
Today, there are people who choose not to have children and there are others who are involved in same sex relationships or relationships with multiple partners. While the nuclear family