The perfect marriage gone perfectly wrong

Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn (Crown Publishers, 2012)

I don't think there is anything to be said about Gone Girl that hasn't already been said in the buzz of media attention it got last year. What I'm impressed about is that somehow I managed to miss all the spoilers. Or maybe I didn't, because as it happened, my initial suspicions about plot twists proved pretty spot on.

Has anyone missed the overview yet? Amy and Nick are celebrating ("celebrating") their fifth anniversary, except she goes missing the morning of. The novel alternates between Nick's first person narrative as Amy's disappearance is discovered and the investigation begins, and Amy's diary entries, ranging from when they met and through their marriage. That the marriage is troubled is immediately clear, and it's additionally clear that they both have secrets. But that's the thing about secrets - you can keep them hidden even from your reader. And boy is authorial reliability brought into question here.

It's much more than the tale of a disappearance, it's the story of a marriage, and even before that, the ways that childhood shapes (or misshapes) you in ways both seen and unseen.

And even though I guessed right about Amy's disappearance, I didn't actually trust that I was right, which made the turn almost as surprising. And even more to the point, I could not have predicted all of the twists and turns, and the flood of detail.

I'm not sure it's the ideal read for someone like me, whose relationship with anxiety is so fraught. I coiled up so tense that I am still trying to work myself out. And my dreams last night.... well, let's just say that Plants vs. Zombies and Gone Girl combine in bizarre and frightening ways.

Do you speak my tongue?

The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts - Gary Chapman (Northfield, 1992, 2010)

I've been curious about this book since a friend gushed over it about a year ago. It seemed a little self-helpy to me, and my library catalog attaches it to Christianity. Also, I'm not sure what marriage I'm working on. But.

It seemed pretty self-evident to me that there are different ways to express love, and that some expressions of love mean more to different people. So I picked it up, and spent an afternoon with it and a glass of iced tea.

Here are the five love languages:

• Words of Affirmation
• Quality Time
• Gifts
• Acts of Service
• Physical Touch

Dr. Chapman devotes a chapter to each one, and has lots and lots of examples of marriages falling apart that were saved by the decision to really try to speak one another's language. Cute.

Okay, fine. I get that. What I found most interesting was the relative ease and difficulty of figuring out the dominant love languages of those around me. My mom was immediately obvious, and it threw a lot of areas of our family dynamic into sharp relief. My dad was harder. Some friends became clear just as they popped into my head over the past few days, as I'd be thinking about other things. What frightens me is that I look at my past romantic relationships, and I can't say for sure what my partners' languages have been. Even more so, I can't figure out my own. He offers lots of tips for figuring it out, but all I really got to was that one of the five is definitely not mine. (This one, by the way, happens to be my mom's, which I find amusing.) So I'm still puzzling that out. (Chapman has an edition for singles, which might be worth digging up.)

What I have thought about is that I can show love and appreciation in my relationship through all these ways, and that I should, in order to really ensure the people around me know that I appreciate them. It has also been a good reminder that they show their appreciation and love in different ways too. Sometimes, when you're convinced love looks a certain way, you miss the love that's right in front of you.