"Invented Self"

Instead of focusing on feminism for the topic of my paper like I had originally planned, I decided to write on the idea of the "invented self," or the personality people create for themselves when they want someone to become interested in them in the romantic way, just as Amy did when she created the "Cool Girl" side of herself. Karen Horney, a German psychoanalyst, created the "Theory of The Self" in which she describes how we all have two views of ourselves, the "real self" and the "ideal self." The "real self" is who we are at the core, and the "ideal self" is who we feel we should be. In the case of Gone Girl, Amy develops an "ideal self" when she meets Nick and decides she has to be the "Cool Girl" in order for him to maintain his interest in her. However, that happens to be who Nick falls in love with, and once Amy finally reveals her "real self" to Nick, he almost immediately loses his love for her, causing Amy to become enraged. For my paper, I want to specifically talk about how common the circumstances Amy and Nick were in in the beginning are. In Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn talks about how men have come to expect a woman to be the "Cool Girl" or won't maintain interest otherwise. Amy's rage at the fact that she had to pretend to be someone else, someone unbelievingly accommodating for her husband's lack of concern for, well, anything, is what initially sparked the idea of writing about feminism for me. But there's so much literature about the different aspects of feminism already, and I want to write about different, especially since Flynn made all feminists look rather insane in the end. I want to talk about how I believe both men and women create this "ideal self" when they meet someone, and how I think it is the deep rooted cause of most of the divorces in the country. To portray this through my four genres, I have the idea of basing them all around the relationship between one couple, and how it changes over time. I plan to have my first one be their marriage vows, and the husband announcing everything that he loves about his wife, the two in the middle show how their relationship changes and how each person is not who they once believed they were, and the last one being a eulogy, in which the husband repeats the exact same qualities that he loved about his wife in the marriage vows in exactly the same way to reflect that throughout their entire marriage, they never truly got past the "ideal self" they created for one another. Two things I am worried about, is that I would prefer the relationship in my genres to end in divorce rather than death to further annunciate my point, but I'm not sure of a way to do that, and I don't want my genre to come off as blaming men for the ending of all marriages in this manner, as I believe it is the work of both partners that allow a relationship to end in this way.