What Men and Women Do When They Talk About Love : A Sociolinguistic Analysis of" What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" By Raymond Carver

Many people, like the protagonist of Dorothy Parker’s short story “Too Bad,” wonder “what did married people talk about, anyway, when they were alone together?” Raymond Carver’s short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” is the literary rendition of the ways in which married couples talk. This essay analyses this short story taking into account sociolinguistic aspects related to men’s and women’s linguistic behaviour and the speech strategies each gender uses, so as to explore if these characters accurately reflect real life speech patterns or not.