Love Hurts / Comic Books

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• The comic continuation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is no kinder in this regard than the show had been.
  • Buffy and Angel get back together in Season 8? They nearly destroy the world and Angel kills Giles.
  • Xander and Dawn are in a stable relationship in Season 9? She nearly disappears from existence due to the world losing magic and her emotions (including her love) becomes reset to when she was created in Season 5.
  • Buffy and Spike finally get together in Season 10? Spike wakes up to nightmares of killing innocents the literal night they first hook up, then comes to find that the victims he'd dreamed of were real, causing him to believe he'd been hypnotized into killing. Again.
  • Willow hits it off with a member of her coven in Season 11? The girl claims she'll break it off with her girlfriend so she and Willow can be together, then proceeds to just... not do it.
  • Buffy finally manages to say a Love Confession to Spike at the end of Season 11? They break up off-screen before Season 12.
• Explored (somewhat) in Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, where the main character is very much under the impression that this trope is in full effect (and that is only the tip of the iceberg where his intimacy issues are concerned). He attempts to murder the only person he cares for in an attempt at 'immortalizing the moment' and prevent the relationship going bad (because...somehow murder doesn't count as going bad) and later attempts to apologize for the faux pas with a rather bizarre pre-recorded phone message in which he states his intention to forget about her, lest he attempt to hurt her again.
  Johnny: I like you immensely, Devi. And to prove it, I shall obliterate all of my affection and interest for you. Just like before, but different. I cannot hurt what I do not acknowledge. I don't know of anyone that I love, or of anyone that loves me, but I give you what I can. I give my nothing.
• In The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past comic adaptation, Link and Zelda develop a psychic bond which makes their separation after defeating Ganon physically painful; and this will likely continue until both of their deaths.
• Any romance in any Marvel, DC, or other company you care to name wherein the relationship lasted more than 3 years real-time/10 months in-universe and the characters, to this day, are not together. Don't even go into the ones that are together... Examples are just too numerous to list. Averted with Ralph (Elongated Man) & Sue Dibny, who were happily married in his second appearance back in the 1960s and in death were still together.
• Rose Walker's great "love hurts" speech to Desire in The Sandman. This exchange sums up Desire's approach to most things but especially love:
  Rose: Are you going to hurt me? Kill me? Mess me up?
  Desire: No more than usually; no; and perhaps a little. But only with love.
• Scott Pilgrim. No one is safe from that in that comic. Gets to its extremes with Ramona and Knives though. A chapter is even named 'Love Hurts'.
• Supergirl:
  • Kara doesn't seem to have much luck in the romance department. Most of guys she dates turn out to be jerks, creeps, cheaters, or super-villains. When she dates a guy who is actually nice and well-meaning, she often has to break up with him. This is true of all her incarnations.
  • Pre-Crisis Supergirl dated Dick Malverne when they were teenagers. Many years later Dick sought her out to confess that he always loved her... because he was dying from cancer. They kissed the night he died, leaving Kara heart-broken.
    That was the last time I saw Richard. Tonight I know what it is to be human. Tonight my super skin is still invulnerable, but my Richard is never coming back, and my heart is broken into a million pieces.
  • Supergirl (Volume 5) Issue #15 is titled "Love Hurts". Kara finds out her then-boyfriend Power Boy is an abusive stalker.
  • Post-Flashpoint Supergirl feels like she has been betrayed or let down by those who she has loved and cared about: her father, her cousin, her only friend... and in H'el on Earth she falls for a man who turns to be a mad mass-murderer who was manipulating her.
• Dr Allison Mann in Y: The Last Man angrily denies that love is anything other than a label stuck on a biological process. We later find this apparently cynical attitude comes from Allison being dumped by her first girlfriend (and her parents' miserable marriage). Despite this it is clear she still craves love herself.

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