Love In Our Culture Short Story

Every day, we come across love in our culture. We are surrounded by it. It is in our movies, novels, poems, and they all celebrate it as if it is all that we need. We have come to expect love to be the cure-all for all of our life’s problems, which often leads to our relationships suffering. The three short stories, “That Color” by Jon McGregor, “Reunion” by Edward Mullany, and “The Ache” by Elena Bossi, all tell the same story: love is not enough. There are other aspects of relationships that are just as, if not more important than love; things like understanding, compassion, and respect. And the success of our relationships hinges on these deeper and more important values. The story of “The Ache” tells a romantic tale of loss and yearning. …show more content…
It tells a tale of an ex-husband and ex-wife. They meet at the department store while shopping with their respective new spouses. Right off the bat, the woman shows no respect to her current spouse by intentionally sitting next to her ex-husband, excusing it by saying “I’d been shopping all day, so in a way I was able to rationalize it”. But by saying “in a way”, even she admits that what she is doing is wrong. Similarly, her ex-husband, Jack, is disrespectful towards his current wife by engaging with his ex-wife in a suspicious matter—“But Jack and I had been divorced long enough to know that speaking of each other’s mates when those mates weren’t there to defend themselves inevitably led to suspicions of jealousy, even if what was said was meant to be funny, so we’d made it a rule to keep our mouths shut.” When his wife calls him, he gets up, but not before looking into the bag of his ex-wife that contains Christmas presents. What is worse is how his ex-wife reacts. Jack’s wife comes out from the fitting room, and sees Jack’s hand in his ex-wife’s bag, and his ex-wife uses this opportunity to sabotage her ex-husband’s relationship—“I smiled in a way that was suggestive rather than friendly, and arched just one of my eyebrows”. This in turn results in the woman turning away in tears, showing that she is obviously hurt. Over the course of the story, we notice implications that Jack and his ex-wife still share feelings for each other. It is not too far fetched to say that they were in love when they were married, but they are no longer together. With how both of them behave in the story, it is no surprise why they are not married, and why we can expect their current relationships to not work out either. Unlike in “The Ache” and “That Color”, the main characters in this story show no sign of respect towards their spouses. This further proves that there is more to a