History Main / MayflyDecemberRomance

** [[OurWerewolvesAreDifferent Werewolves]] are immune to old age and disease and can live for centuries [[spoiler: or millennia: Bran and Samuel were alive when Christianity arrived in Wales around 1700 years ago]] barring injury and insanity, though some wolves simply burn out after a while. The werewolf Samuel Cornick has had three human wives, each of whom died of old age. Another, unnamed werewolf in ''Cry Wolf'' is shown kissing his elderly wife who was initially mistaken for his grandmother. [[spoiler: In ''Hunting Grounds'', Arthur chooses to have his wife assassinated by vampires rather than suffer seeing her die of old age.]]
** The [[TheFairFolk Fae]] have this problem as well. Unlike the werewolves, many of them are truly immortal unless killed, and they have long had dalliances with humans that resulted in offspring. Unless their human lover is taken to Underhill, they'll age and die in what to the Fae is not much more than an eye-blink. And if they ''are'' take to Underhill, they have to deal with the fact that their lover will tire of them after a few decades or centuries but they'll be forever unable to return home lest all their lost time [[NoImmortalInertia instantly come back to them]]. The same options exist for any resulting half-Fae children: sometimes the kid will win the SuperpowerLottery and be strong enough to be considered a true Fae, but often they get just a little bit of magic and a parent who might wonder off and forget to look in on them until they're a century or two dead.

** In ''The Book of D'ni'', Atrus the younger notes that his wife Catharine is aging a bit faster than himself, thanks to his 1/4 D'ni ancestry. In ''Myst V: End of Ages'', [[spoiler: he appears at the end, aged at least 150, so there's no doubt he outlived her]].

* The premise of the fantasy novel ''Literature/{{Sirena}}'', by Donna Jo Napoli, where the protagonist is one of the Greek Sirens who will become immortal after having sex with a human man. Falling in love with said man, however, makes the irrevocable gift a curse. [[spoiler: In the end, Sirena and her love Philoctetes separate after ten years together, so they can each rejoin the society of their own kind. But they will never, ever forget each other.]]

* ''Literature/{{Stardust}}'' features this. Mortal human man, immortal ex-star in human woman form -> dead man and still immortal star regent of their kingdom. In the movie they got around this handily by playing on the "heart of a star" thing, i.e. one who has the heart of a star will live forever. In the films they claim that Yvaine had "given" her heart to Tristan/Tristran, and therefor they will both live happily forever after.

** In the ''Literature/StarTrekNewFrontier'' ExpandedUniverse series, Selar (a Vulcan with a lifespan of about 250 years) mates with a Hermat (with a 40-year lifespan...and both sets of genitals). Selar carries a child to term...and it turns out he has the lifespan of an Ocampa (10 years, if he's lucky.) In the most recent novel of the series, ''Treason'', this gets fixed, though ironically (for multiple reasons) [[spoiler: Selar dies before this happens.]] It's not a happy book.

* The ''Franchise/{{Castlevania}}'' series has a couple of these. Dracula and Lisa. Alucard and Maria [[spoiler: and Lyudmil from the radio drama, if you interpret it like that; Alucard even talks about it with him, saying, "Lyudmil… humans will return to dust eventually, but I will live on forever. Compared to eternity, my time with you is short…"]]

** You'd think combining this with ReincarnationRomance would remove the pitfalls of the trope, but ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIII2'' shows that this combination has even worse problems. [[spoiler: Namely, that the "December" gets so sick of watching his lover die over and over again in different lives that he tries to destroy time to make it stop.]]

** Inverted with ''VideoGame/FireEmblemTheBlazingBlade'''s quasi-canon couple Eliwood and Ninian. You'd think being a [[spoiler: 1000-year-old half-dragon would mean Ninian would outlive Eliwood, but in fact abandoning the dragon homeworld makes her die within the next twenty years, as the changes in Elibe itself make the survival of dragons and half-dragons much harder than it used to.]]
** Which leads into the relationship between Eliwood's son, Roy and possible bride Sophia [[spoiler: who, like Ninian, is half-human, half-dragon. However, there is no mention of any changes to her lifespan, possibly because she doesn't come from another dimension like Ninian does. If you also accept that Ninian is Roy's mom, then you have the interesting case of a quarter-dragon and a half-dragon.]] It should be noted that the support conversations between [[spoiler: half-dragon]] Sophia and [[spoiler: full dragon]] Fae also directly discuss this trope, albeit from the friendship angle: [[spoiler: Fae ''will'' outlive Sophia and all the friends she has made in the game, and she's ''not'' pleased at all.]]

* In ''VideoGame/LunarEternalBlue'', you find that [[spoiler: The goddess Althena averts this by ''giving up'' her immortality and living out the rest of her life as Luna. A straighter, and more platonic example is Nall, who ''did'' in fact outlive his friends, and Ruby, who has to come to grips with the fact that she will do the same.]] Presumably this will be an issue for Lucia and Hiro as well.

** Also prominent in ''VideoGame/TalesOfPhantasia'', with the half-elf Arche. Even though she's from one-hundred and two years in the past, she's going to live much longer than all of her friends, and even her love interest. It's shown in one of the sequels [[spoiler: that in a few hundred years, she still misses Chester.]]
* ''VideoGame/{{Undertale}}'' discusses the trope on a child to parent relationship instead of romance in the PlayableEpilogue if you get the GoldenEnding. [[spoiler: Gerson tells Frisk that even if Toriel and Asgore adopted them, they would certainly outlive Frisk since Toriel and Asgore are boss monsters and cannot age if they don't have children of their own. The trope can be played straight if you choose to have Frisk live with Toriel as her adopted child or avert the trope by having Frisk go on their own adventures while keeping in touch with Toriel and the others.]]

** This ends up being the romance between [[spoiler:Zeetha and Airman Higgs]], as the former is young woman in her twenties while the latter is [[spoiler: an immortal, thousand-plus year old [[SuperSoldier Jaegermonster]].]] Except [[spoiler:Zeetha has now been dosed with the same Super-Soldier potion]], so who knows what's going to happen.
** Played straight with Oggie the Jaeger and his long-dead wife; he feels she's still alive as long there are descendents around, and he makes a constant effort to see that his great-grandchildren keep procreating.

* Aang and Katara in ''WesternAnimation/AvatarTheLastAirbender''. The former is 112 years old (although has been frozen in an iceberg for those 100 years) and Katara is 14. This is justified, however, since Aang hasn't had any experiences beyond the years he lived out, so mentally, he isn't really older than Katara (except for the wisdom he was taught as an airbender monk). [[spoiler: This explains why his conscious lifespan was way shorter than Katara's in ''WesternAnimation/TheLegendOfKorra'', where he is dead long before Korra's adventure even begins.]] Then again, it was pretty obvious that something like that would happen, considering the fact that the previous Avatar in the cycle ''must die'' for the next Avatar to be born. However, if Aang ''hadn't'' had his lifespan cut short by being frozen this trope would be in full swing as Avatars are exceedingly long-lived (the oldest Avatar mentioned in canon, Kyoshi, was 230 at her death).

* ''Manga/VermeilInGold'': Vermeil a 550-year-old demoness becomes the {{familiar}} of, and eventually falls in love with, teenage mage Alto.

* One ending in ''VideoGame/SaGaFrontier'' has one of these. [[spoiler: Asellus' Half-Mystic ending has Gina, a human, shown as a grandmother while her beloved Asellus is still the young woman she was when they first met. It's becoming harder for Asellus to come back every year and see Gina grow older.]]

* Deconstructed on both sides of the relationship in ''Fanfic/BreathOfTheWild'' with Link x Mipha, especially since [[spoiler: they have a daughter]]. For Link, he lives with agony knowing that he won't live nearly as long as his lover [[spoiler: or his daughter, especially because Link will die before Lochlia even grows up]]. For Mipha, she suffers the pain of knowing that [[spoiler: her daughter will largely grow up without her father. She remedies this by keeping diaries, one of which is exclusively about Link.]]

* ''Series/TheTwilightZone1959'': In the episode "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E24LongLiveWalterJameson Long Live Walter Jameson]]", a man who [[OlderThanTheyLook appears to be in his thirties or forties]] is [[ReallySevenHundredYearsOld revealed to be thousands of years old]]. [[spoiler:He leaves his wife to prevent her from discovering his secret, but she tracks him down anyway when she is old and he is still young.]]

* ''VideoGame/HonakiStarRail'': The Xianzhou Alliance actually has laws against this, as they were GenreSavvy enough to know what happens when a long-life species consummates with a [[WeAreAsMayflies human]].

* In ''A Kiss Before The Apocalypse'' by Thomas E Sniegoski, author of {{Literature/The Fallen}}, private investigator, Remy Chandler (once the angel Remiel) faces the inevitable result of an immortal married to a mortal woman. [[spoiler: His wife, Madeline, is old and dying in the hospital at the time of the novel.]] He is still feeling the effects in the short story, ''Noah’s Orphans'' (which appears in the urban stories anthology ''Mean Streets'').

* The premise of the fantasy novel ''Sirena'', by Donna Jo Napoli, where the protagonist is one of the Greek Sirens who will become immortal after having sex with a human man. Falling in love with said man, however, makes the irrevocable gift a curse. [[spoiler: In the end, Sirena and her love Philoctetes separate after ten years together, so they can each rejoin the society of their own kind. But they will never, ever forget each other.]]

** Connor [=MacLeod=]'s first love was with Heather, a mortal blacksmith's daughter in medieval Scotland. They were married for 53 years until her death by old age in 1590.[[note]]Heather's age is never stated, but judging by the actress's age in this film and ''Film/HighlanderEndgame'' it appears she lived to her mid-seventies.[[/note]] And this was still only a tiny portion of Connor's own immortal lifespan.

** Connor [=MacLeod=]'s first love was with a mortal blacksmith's daughter in medieval Scotland. They were married for 53 years until her death by old age in 1590, so she vastly outlived the average life expectancy of people from that time. And this was still only a tiny portion of his own immortal lifespan.
** Connor's [[MentorArchetype mentor Ramirez]] explains in one scene that he was born in AncientEgypt and he had married three times over his two-thousand year life, the last time to a Japanese princess named Shakiko, whose genius UltimateBlacksmith father made his [[KatanasAreJustBetter badass ivory-handled katana]] as a dowry gift. [[CelibateHero He swore off ever having relationships with mortal women again after the death of Shakiko, and even warns Connor against pursuing Heather to spare him the inevitable heartbreak]]. The way he talks about poor Shakiko even many, many centuries after her passing suggests he still misses her dearly.

* ''Series/BabylonFive'': There is an interesting example of this with the relationship between [[spoiler:John Sheridan and Delenn]]. Minbari already outlive Humans, though normally by only a few decades, and considering the ages of both characters she probably would have only outlived him by two or three decades. However, a HeroicSacrifice to save half the galaxy shaved at least forty years off his lifespan, leaving them a scant 20 years of married life. [[note]]A bit of irony is that it may in fact have been Sheridan that "outlived" Delenn as [[NoBodyLeftBehind his body was never found]], [[AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence only a sealed empty ship that had him entering it but never exiting it]]. But then, Valen's body was never found either, even though he was entirely mortal. The batting record for members of the One being ascended to a higher plane are therefore 2 out of 3. Draw your own conclusions about Delenn's ultimate disposition.[[/note]]

** The Nabateans in ''VideoGame/FireEmblemThreeHouses'' are Manaketes in all but name, so it's assumed that [[spoiler:Seteth or Flayn]] will outlive any of their possible love interests by centuries. The same may be true of [[spoiler:Byleth]], though due to their unique powers they may be able to control the rate at which they age and live a normal human lifespan.
*** Surprisingly, this was the ''opposite'' for [[spoiler:Byleth's]] parents, with their father, a human, being over 300 years old [[spoiler:(albeit thanks to his crest blood)]], and their mother, [[spoiler:an artificial Nabatean]], not being expected to live past twenty.