The Argonauts

Nelson opens with an anecdote about the first time she admitted her feelings to her eventual husband: “[T]he words I love you came tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass, my face smashed against the cement floor of your dank and charming bachelor pad” (3). Partly to ease the sense of “vulnerability” she felt after this admission, Nelson began to send Dodge quotes from famous writers and philosophers about love, including Roland Barthes’s claim that the phrase “I love you” (5), repeated over the course of a relationship, constantly takes on new meanings.

Throughout these early days of the relationship, Nelson and Dodge constantly debated the nature of language. Dodge felt that language stripped the world of its inherent ambiguity, while Nelson—a writer—“insist[ed] that words did more than nominate” (4). Both Nelson and Dodge’s views on this question softened over time, with Nelson coming to understand why Dodge might feel that language was “not good enough” (7). She recounts an early and unsuccessful attempt on her part to Google Dodge’s preferred pronouns and describes her frustration at having to think about Dodge in “the third person” (7) at all.