Gaitskill's "Tiny, Smiling Daddy" focuses on the father and his downward spiral of feeling increasingly disconnected from his family, particularly his lesbian daughter, whose article about father-daughter relationships provides the catalyst for the father realized he had wronged his daughter and destroyed their relationship. Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" focuses on Mel and his attempt to define, compare and contrast romantic love, while leaving him drunk and confused as he was before. While both of my stories explore how distressed love traumatizes the psyche and seem to agree that love poses life's greatest dilemma, and at the same time constitutes the most valued perspective of life, the two stories differ in that frustrated family love causes Gaitskill syndrome. protagonist to become comprehensible and therefore evokes reader sympathy, but on the other hand, frustrated romantic love does nothing for Carver's protagonist except keep him disconnected from his wife and leave him unchanged, remaining static as as a character and generally unlikable. Comparing "Tiny, Smiling Daddy" and "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," they together suggest that familial love is more important than romantic love, which we strive tirelessly to achieve, often forgetting that we will always feel alone without family love, arguably the origin of love itself. "Tiny, Smiling Daddy" opens with "one of those pure, beautiful dreams in which he was young again, and filled with the realization that friends who had died, or gone, or had decided they wouldn't "loved him more, that they had really been there all along, that they loved him" (Gaitskill 305), and through this nostalgic state, the father revealed himself as a character who had...a background of paper.... ..e, because she's too busy running around with..." (Gaitskill 317) and these words show us how completely "shitty" he feels (Gaitskill 317), whether that be justified or not. He is faced with the reality that his wife and daughter are "leaving" him behind, doing whatever is necessary to break away from his miserable stubbornness and, as a result, he is left unhappy and alone to reflect on a bitter past and to an even more difficult present. He starts out as a sympathetic character, but gradually becomes a self-righteous, hateful idiot. But in the end, the reader feels extremely sympathetic towards him. Although he is in fact the villain, it leads us to view him as the villain whose evil is almost justified, or at least that it is an inevitable symptom of his difficult childhood, his poor marriage, his extreme anxiety about what others think of him, and disapproval of his daughter's lifestyle.