my last blog post

After being stuck for a while and not knowing what story I wanted to choose for my second and final special entry. I ended up picking the short story we read in class titled, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”. I really enjoyed reading this poem in class and had an idea of what the author was trying to say. After reading it a couple more times, I started to get a different interpretation than after my first time reading it. This might seem to be a weird choice for a special entry because it seems to be easily understood and seem to have only one interpretation.
The main part of this story that I thought needs the most looking over to get different interpretations is the conversation between Mel and his wife Terri on true love. This is a story about two couples sitting around a coffee table talking, with one of the couples named Mel and Terri telling the other couple about their previous love or lack thereof. This story is mainly about Mel and Terri showing their two very different views on what true love is and what it is not. It starts with Terri and her husband Mel telling their friends about her last relationship before she met Mel. “Terri said the man she lived with before she lived with Mel loved her so much he tried to kill her”. In her eyes this was an act of true love by her boyfriend, even though it would have caused harm to her. I believe she thought this to be him showing love because she knew he was insane and had a very different view on what it meant to love someone. While Mel disagrees later in the story, he states “I don’t know what you call it, but I sure know you wouldn’t call it love”. After my first time reading this short story I would have to agree with Mel, being that Terri’s boyfriend obviously had something messed up in his head. His mental problems were the main reason in me not agreeing with Terri’s point of view that he was in love with her. Later in the story it goes on to tell you that he used to stalk them and make numerous threats, to both, then later he tries kills himself. This shows that he had many mental issues and maybe didn’t even love Terri at all.
Then they start to talk a little about Mel's ex wife and his angry thoughts about her. After all of the things he says to Terri about her previous relationship not being true love because the guy tried to kill her, then goes on talk about his last relationship. He states that she is allergic to bees and then goes on to talk about how he has contemplated getting a lot of bees to let them lose so they can kill her. This shows that maybe Mel also has some mental problems just like Terri’s ex boyfriend. This is also a very hypocritical thing to say since he just said her last boyfriend did not actually love her since her tried to kill her. Then he goes on to say that his relationship was true love even though he also has contemplated trying to kill his last girlfriend. After finishing this short story what I find very interesting is that Mel said he truly loved his ex wife and made me rethink my view on who actually loved who.
So after I got done readying this short story and took all the text in to account to make a solid interpretation. I started to think maybe both of their previous relationships were actually true love, even though both men thought of evil things about their wife. My reason for coming up with this idea is that I started to think, how can someone not in the relationship be able to say if they actually did love each other or not. I know that they both did or thought about doing some stupid stuff, but that doesn’t mean neither man loved their woman. This short story makes me think of the saying “love makes you do crazy things” and what are some of these crazy things that they mean. Does this mean love drives people crazy, or that you will do crazy things for the people that you love? It sounds like the same thing but if you think about it is two very different ideas. The first part saying “that love drives someone crazy” means that someone who is in true love will then be driven to do crazy things, like in the story maybe for instance trying to kill your girlfriend because he can’t see himself without her. The next part is saying “it drives you to do crazy things for the people you love”, meaning that you will do things that make no sense in doing but you do them anyway because you love her.
The last thing I started to think about is that Terri believed through everything her last boyfriend did to her, that he still did truly love her. This made me think that maybe love has many different meanings and ways for people to show their love to others. I know that someone doesn’t love their dad and mom the same way they love their wife, but this caused me to think is there different forms of love in marriage. For example, if a man lets his wife boss him around all the time, is this true love. What if the roles are changed and the man is the one that bosses his wife around all ways telling her what to do. Are both of these relationships examples of true love, is there a difference in the love between the two relationships?

This was a fun and tough text to get a solid interpretation for this blog. I know a lot of this interpretation is all over the place, but I think that is because deciding which last relationship was actually true love is a hard topic to make a yes/no judgement.