Somebody who loves another's alter ego while disliking their civilian identity in Literature.
- In Anansi Boys Rosie is in love with Spider, who she thinks is her fiance Fat Charlie, but he's actually Charlie's alter ego...sort of.
- In the Bengali play Chitra by Rabindranath Tagore, Princess Chitra is a plain-faced Tomboy who prays to the gods that she be granted perfect beauty for one year, so as to seduce the warrior Arjuna. She gets her wish and romances him under a different name. As the year comes to an end, Arjuna hears of Princess Chitra's famous exploits and begins to fall in love with her. When he confesses this to Chitra, she reveals herself to him and they live Happily Ever After.
- In Crown Duel by Sherwood Smith Meliara begins corresponding with an unknown figure who helps her navigate court politics. It turns out this man is Shevraeth, the future king, who she has had some Belligerent Sexual Tension with. She experiences some internal conflict when the mystery writer tells her Shevraeth plans on taking a queen in a desperate attempt to unite her feelings for the letter writer and for him.
- Subverted in Death Sentence (the sequel to Death Wish), Paul Benjamin starts a relationship with a court employee named Irene Evans. Her comments about the vigilante (whom she does not know as just Benjamin's alter ego) do not seem to indicate she particularly supports the vigilante.
- The Scarlet Pimpernel: Marguerite Blakeney is estranged from her ditzy fop of a husband Sir Percy and in love with the brave, selfless, mysterious vigilante the Scarlet Pimpernel. Talk about some things never change...
- Simon and Blue from Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda fall for each other online, but don't know each other in person, and Simon is stressed that Blue would no longer like him when he finds out who he really is.
- Averted in The Spider; Nita Van Sloan supported Richard Wentworth as himself and the Spider.
- Even though she knows who he really is, Action Girl/Lancer Elli Quinn from Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga is deeply in love with her commander, Admiral Miles Naismith—but not so enamored of his real identity Lt. Miles Vorkosigan. ("I've heard you do his accent" is as close as she can come to acknowledging it.) Her refusal to come to terms with this exasperates Miles ("I don't do his accent; he does mine") and eventually scuttles the relationship.
- This becomes a major problem for Gara Petothel in X-Wing: Wraith Squadron, who is an imperial secret agent who likes her covert identiy as an Alliance pilot so much, she would rather like to become the mask. Unfortunately the one pilot to show romantic interest her is the only survivor of an ambush she had set up months before. Not only did the death of all his friends traumatize him deeply, it's also his friendship to her that slowly helps him to recover. In the end, she is forced to kill off the Gara Petothel identity, but is able to start a new life under another persona, and hooks up with Myn under the name of Kirney Slane.
