"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is a short story of two married couples, Mel and Terri and Nick and Laura, who engage in a conversation one evening about the meaning of real love.

As the story opens, Mel is talking as Nick, from whose perspective the story takes place, provides some description of the scene in Mel's kitchen. Mel, his wife, Terri, Nick, and his wife, Laura, are seated at the kitchen table at Mel and Terri's home. The late afternoon sunlight filters into the room as the couples repeatedly pass the bottles of gin and tonic and an ice bucket.

The geographic location of the story is Albuquerque, but as Nick notes "we were all from someplace else." Mel is a cardiologist who spent five years in a seminary before going to medical school and thinks the years at the...