What we talk about when we talk about love, Raymond Carver

This short story begins with two couples having drinks together and talking. The narrator is the husband in a couple more recently married, and Mel and Terri are an older couple. They're talking about love.
Terri goes on to describe her abusive relationship before marrying Mel, and the way even though he hurt her, she still felt as though that was his way of loving her, and therefore she still loved him in a way.
The couples continue to talk about true love, asking what any of them really know about love, if any of them know what love is.
Mel (a cardiologist) then goes on to tell a story about an elderly couple that he operated on who were severely injured in a car accident, and how they loved each other so much. He also mentions how he would have loved to be a knight if he could re-do his life.
By now Mel is drunk and has gotten himself worked up, feeling depressed about this old couple's love. He then mentions how he would love to kill his ex-wife with bees, since she is allergic.
The story then ends with the couples deciding to eat.

The first moment I would choose to analyze is on page 177 when Mel says "if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I think the other one [...] would grieve for a while, you know, but then the surviving party would go out and love again."I think this quote is really interesting regarding what love is and how we think about love, especially since many both Mel and his wife had loved other people before they loved each other. I think this statement and Terri's reaction to it show an important part of their characters.

The next moment I would choose to analyze is the last three sentences: "I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark." The symbol of the human heart is threaded throughout the story, whether literally through Mel's job or figuratively through all of the discussion about love. It would be interesting to look more closely at the way the heart and love is considered throughout the story and the way it connects and disconnects the four people.

The next moments I would choose is when Terri describes her first husband and says "Sure, sometimes he may have acted crazy. Okay. But he loved me. In his own way, maybe, but he loved me." Throughout the story the two couples wrestle with what love really is, and I think this quote shows just how relative and ambiguous love can be, which I think could make for an interesting analysis in relation to the rest of the story.