Literature is filled with bickering couples, but it is difficult to point to any one precedent for the characters in this story.

To the extent that this dialogue is considered a sketch, a tradition can be traced back through the psychological sketch by fin de siecle women writers such as Ada Leverson, Evelyn Sharp, and Charlotte Mew, and on to regional sketches by nineteenth-century American women.

More relevant are Parker's contemporaries—Ernest Hemingway in his cycle of "marriage stories," Edna St. Vincent Milky in her Distressing Dialogues, Katherine Mansfield in "Bliss" (1920) and Djuna Barnes in her short stories, among others—who offer a more pared down narrative. These writers also examined romantic love in the early twentieth century with a jaundiced eye. All of them portray the difficulties, ironies, and failures of so-called modern love with its attendant freedoms and complications.