Reincarnation Romance

A second chance for these mooncrossed lovers.

"It's almost like I knew this man from another life
Like back then maybe I was his husband
And maybe he was my wife..."

— India.Arie, "The Truth"

You know the drill. "A love so strong it conquered time!" (and took no prisoners!)

Two people love each other so deeply, and are tied by the Red String of Fate so closely, that they will meet and fall in love every time they reincarnate, lifetime after lifetime.

This is a very old trope. It is common in stories for the Shōjo Demographic and Eastern romance, where belief in reincarnation is more prevalent. This is sometimes used in Western stories to give Star-Crossed Lovers a second, more successful go after things go south in the story, an alternative to Together in Death for making a Downer Ending into the good kind of ambiguous ending.

It can get interesting if the genders reverse, or only one of theirs does. Infidelity is usually a complete non-issue; their love is so strong they may not even date at all until they meet their eternal better half... unless their reincarnating romance also tends to fall into the same bad habits. Things can get wonky if one of them is or becomes immortal: they end up having to wait decades or even centuries for their loved one to return in a strange form of Mayfly–December Romance. Only very rarely will one or the other honestly fall in love with a third person.

Even more complications arise if one of the two has been brought Back from the Dead via a Resurrected Romance, rather than through reincarnation.

Compare Amnesiac Lover, Reincarnation Friendship, and Doppelgänger Gets Same Sentiment. See also Eternal Love, which describes a different kind of very long-term relationship between immortals, and Time-Travel Romance, which uses time travel instead of reincarnation to bridge the temporal gap. When handled badly, this can very easily turn into Strangled by the Red String.

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Examples:

• Anime & Manga
• Fan Works

Advertising

• This ad for Lynx body spray (marketed as Axe in the US) shows a Love at First Sight type romance that starts in prehistory, cycles through various eras, and ends successfully in the modern day.

Comic Books

• A graphic novel about the history of The Troubles gave this a nasty twist; Two Star-Crossed Lovers from warring Celtic tribes are cursed to forever be reincarnated on opposite sides of whatever the current conflict is, until Ireland is at peace.
• Hawkman and Hawkgirl are reincarnated Egyptian nobles who were murdered but found each other again in modern times. In fact, thanks to an Nth Metal dagger, they are both cursed to meet, fall in love, and die tragically in each life. The battery of the Star Sapphires, who represent love on the emotional spectrum, even contains the crystallized remains of their original incarnations, which were found on Zamaron. The two are all but stated to be the personification of tragic love.
  • The trope was deconstructed with Kendra Saunders, who was a reincarnation of Hawkgirl, but without the memories. Meanwhile, Carter Hall kept his memories. This led to him pushing a lot of expectations on her, and her pulling a Screw Destiny and seeing other people. They do eventually end up together again... before dying. Then are reincarnated again about a week later.
• In Lori Lovecraft: My Favorite Redhead, the immortal priest Amma Ton believes that Lori is the reincarnation of his ancient love. Lori is uncertain about this, but she is willing to consider the idea, and later uses Amma Ton's belief in it to her advantage.
• Subverted in a story in the British girls' comic Misty, where a girl discovers that in her previous life she committed suicide to escape a forced marriage. Her would-be husband has also reincarnated and is looking for her; having full memories of their previous lives and the evil plan that he was to make her part of. He's none too happy when his intended "bride" isn't quite so fond of him as he expects.
• Requiem Vampire Knight: Heinrich and Rebecca, who were a German Nazi and a German Jew in love with each other on Earth, become lovers once again on the hellworld of Résurrection when the former is reincarnated as a vampire and the latter as a lamia.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Comic Cavalcade: Judy MacGregor and Sheriff Gary Banks have a rather twisted iteration of the concept. His past self was rather taken with her but was respectful of the fact that she was engaged, while she lightly flirted with him before murdering him in a rage because her fiancé wasn't on hand when she first learned that her fiancé had married someone else. He was her first victim as she started out as a pirate, while their 1940s iterations ended up in love.
  • Wonder Woman (2006): Zeus ressurects Achilles to lead his army of zombified Greek Heroes in subjugating humanity. Achilles turns on Zeus and his plans and comes across the reincarnation of Patroclus living in Washington DC, and the two start dating.
• The X-Men storyline Curse of the Mutants puts a dark spin in this trope when Rogue meets a Indian vampire named Damen, who believes she is the reincarnation of his beloved Rue (who was murdered by klansmen 200 years ago). Turns out he is incorrect, as Rue actually reincarnated as No-Girl, a female telepath reduced to nothing more to a Brain in a Jar. Damen is so horrified to discover her current state he offers to turn Rogue into a vampire while No-Girl is possessing her body to communicate with him, but she refuses since this isn't her real self. She then tries to absorb his memories only to find out Rogue's touch has no effect on him, meaning he is completely barren inside ever since he was turned into a vampire and his feelings aren't real. This revelation leads to Daven handing her his sword so she can put him out of his misery...
• In the French comic Zorn Et Dirna, Death is held prisoner inside a Magic Mirror, with the end result that no one is dying anymore. Instead, the soul of those whose heads have been separated from their body finds itself entering the body of their killer. The titular kids' parents find themselves in the bodies of warriors... except their mother is now one of many souls driving a ginormous black guy and their father is in an Amazonian woman.

Films — Live-Action

• There's an Italian film where a pair of lovers reincarnate several times. Sadly, in the film's last vignette the woman has reincarnated and is a young girl, only to meet her lover while he's still alive from the last cycle, and an old man.
• In the movie 2:22, the main couple is reincarnated from a previous one, shot dead at the day both of them were born. Fate drives the two of them together to solve their own destiny for the better.
• The Adjustment Bureau has a variation of the trope. The two main characters are inextricably attracted to one another, but there is no past life binding them together. What there is, however, is a past future. In a past version of "The Plan", the fate and destiny of all humanity, they were destined to fall in love and be together, but "The Plan" has been re-written by the Chairman. Even though the current version of "The Plan" only has them meeting briefly one time and then parting ways forever, they still feel that connection and draw towards one another from when they were meant to be together.
• Trevor and Aeon in Æon Flux, via cloning rather than mysticism.
• Bad Girls from Valley High: When Drew starts showing interest in new foreign exchange student Katarina, Danielle and her Girl Posse suspect that she might be the reincarnation of Drew's former girlfriend Charity, whom they accidentally murdered. She isn't.
• Birth: Deconstructed. Sean Jr wants this with Anna, which ignores that he's nine and she's in her thirties or forties. She resists for a while, then comes to believe him and agrees with it. By then, he's changed his mind.
• African Prince Manuwalde, better known as Blacula, lives long enough to see his deceased wife Tuva reincarnated in the contemporary world as Tina.
• In Francis Ford Coppola's film adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, a Reincarnation Romance subplot was added, between the title character and Mina Harker nee Murray. This one is iconic enough to be a Trope Codifier in the West, and even gained steam in Japan, as evidenced by Castlevania taking heavy inspiration from this movie for Dracula's backstory.
• Subverted in Chances Are. The husband Louie, dies, but concocts a way to be reborn instantly. Unfortunately, the hasty reincarnation means that his reincarnation, Alex, will still have all memories of Louie's life. 23 years after Louie's death, the memories come crashing down on Alex just as he begins a romance with Louie's daughter Miranda. He naturally cuts it off in favor of the mother/widow Corrine, much to the chagrin of Louie's best friend Phillip, who has loved Corrine this whole time and has helped her raise Miranda. Hilarity Ensues. However, Louie realizes that he's had his time with Corrine, and her clinging to his memory is stopping her from having a relationship with Phillip. Alex is accidentally knocked unconscious and during that time the angel that didn't get a chance to remove Louie's memories between his death and reincarnation catches up with Alex, performing the removal. When Alex wakes up, the last thing he remembers is kissing Miranda (which was literally right before Louie's memories emerged). He and Miranda get back together and Corrine and Phillip get together. Strangely, Corrine and Phillip know that Alex is Louie reincarnated, but are still cool with Alex and Miranda (who doesn't know) being together.
• In the Steven Chow movie A Chinese Odyssey, part of the hell sequence includes an aside where a man has been Star-Crossed Lovers with the same woman and dying because of the romance over several lifetimes.
• Was used throughout movie version of Cloud Atlas (even more than in the book, where reincarnation is only implied), especially considering how many different roles each actor played, some of which meet in several of the 6 stories and fall in love. To list them all:
  • Jim Sturgess and Bae Doona play Hae-Joo Chang and Somni-451, whose romance ends in death, but Somni is confident they'll meet another lifetime. Immediately after she says this, it cuts to a previous life where they are married.
  • Tom Hanks and Halle Berry play Isaac Sachs and Luisa Rey - Isaac dies but Luisa doesn't. In the next life, Dermot Hoggins (Hanks) flirts with an Indian woman (Berry), and the two of them reincarnate as Zachry and Meronym two lives later (with them never meeting in the story inbetween), who get married and have children.
  • Ben Whishaw and Jim Broadbent play Robert Frobisher and Vyvyan Ayrs, with the former flirting with the latter and the latter rejecting it. Although they don't meet in the next lifetime, they do in the one after, as Georgette and Timothy Cavendish, who have an affair.
  • There are aversions as well, however; Robert Frobisher and Rufus Sixsmith never meet again, nor do Timothy Cavendish and Ursula, and nor do Vyvyan Ayrs and his wife Jocasta (although the latter two are both Prescients in the sixth story). And yes, in case you haven't seen it, there are a lot of Love Triangles in the film.
• This is the basic plot of Dead Again, complete with sex-reversal. Roman and Margaret reincarnating and finding each other again, only the fact that a murder separated their last lives causes the reincarnation to go a little off until they discover the truth. Plus, there's a jewelry MacGuffin that facilitates them becoming a Reincarnating Romance.
• The Devil's Messenger: In "The Girl in the Glacier", Dr. Seastrom belives that he and 'Angelica'—the Human Popsicle—were lovers in her time, and he died before their love had run its course. There is no evidence that this is anything other than a delusion of his unbalanced mind.
• Dracula (1973): Dracula targets Lucy because he believes she's the reincarnation of his lost love, Maria.
• In Dracula Untold, Dracula's wife Marina is apparently reincarnated as a modern day equivalent of Mina Murray.
• In Embrace of the Vampire (1995), the title character finds a woman who has the soul of a woman he loved centuries earlier and tries to turn her into a vampire. He also fails.
• In The Fallen Ones (2006), the Big Bad, an evil Fallen Angel, declares the female lead to be the reincarnation of his lover. It is heavily implied that he's right, but she rejects him before he's defeated.
• The Fog (2005) grafted this trope onto its ending, with Elizabeth turning out to be the reincarnation of the wife of the ghosts' leader.
• In Fright Night (1985) the vampire Jerry Dandrige believes that Amy Peterson is the reincarnation of a woman he loved long ago (mainly because Amy exactly resembles her, as shown by the woman's portrait). The movie doesn't make it clear whether he's correct or not, but the fact that he dies at the end indicates he was wrong.
• Highlander III: The Sorcerer. During his time in 18th century France, Connor was in love with an English woman named Sarah. She is reincarnated into Alex Johnson, who becomes his love interest in the present.
• At the end of the Korean film The King and the Clown, right before the main characters commit suicide, it is strongly implied that they will be reborn and meet again in the next life.
• In the film Made in Heaven (1987), there is a Reincarnation/Incarnation Romance. After a young man named Mike (Timothy Hutton) dies in a Heroic Sacrifice, he goes to Heaven and meets his One True Love: Annie (Kelly McGillis), a newborn female soul yet to be conceived on Earth. They fall in love and get married, but Annie is sent to incarnate for her first time on Earth; Mike chooses to reincarnate to find her, and is given 30 years to do so. They find each other just as the deal is about to expire.
• In the Indian film Magadheera, a warrior and a princess are killed on their wedding day by the warrior's sworn enemy. They are reincarnated in 2009 India, respectively as a biker and an heiress, but the prince's enemy was reincarnated as well continuing their duel from 400 years ago to the present.
• The Myth is about the forbidden romance between an ancient Chinese warrior and a Korean princess, which ultimately leads to the princess being trapped in a cavern of immortality and the warrior perishing in a later battle. The film then shifts to modern-day Hong Kong, with the warrior now reincarnated into a present-day archeologist who later returns to the cavern and realize the princess is still waiting for him.
• At the end of Prehistoric Women, David confesses his love for Saria, but she moves away and tells David that her love for him will always remain. She leaves David alone in the rain, along with the statue of the white rhino. As if hypnotized, David moves forward and touches the rhino's horn as lightning strikes. Returned to his own time, David rejoins his Native Guide and they return to camp. David is surprised at how little time has passed for the guide. Once back at the camp, David wonders whether it really was a dream or he had really traveled back in time to reunite a lost African tribe and end a million-year-old legend. As he cleans himself, he discovers the white rhino's brooch in his pocket, proving some truth in his experience. David is then asked to greet some people from London. To his amazement, one of the guests is the image of Saria. The guest then introduces herself as Sarah.
• Happens one-sidedly in Soultaker, a Mystery Science Theater 3000-victim movie from the 90s. The villain, one of the titular Soultakers, believes that the female lead (played by the screenwriter) is the reincarnation of his lover from the Old West - and whose betrayal is the reason he's a Soultaker in the first place. Rather than claiming her soul like he's supposed to, he tries to win her over, which doesn't work out too well.
• A Terra Cotta Warrior has an immortal falling for the reincarnation of his old flame.
• Jihwan and Yoonjung of the Korean film Time Renegades reincarnate as Geonwoo and Soeun, and meet once again in the 2015 timeline. Geonwoo is pretty much smitten immediately, but Soeun? Not so much. The plot of the movie gets significantly more complicated after that.
• Twice-Told Tales: In "The House of the Seven Gables", Jonathan Maulle and Alice Pyncheon are implicitly the reincarnations of Matthew Moll and Laura Holbrook who were engaged but whose marriage never happened because Matthew was executed on trumped-up charges. They are reunited to end the curse of the house and allow them to finally be together.
• Hinted at in We Are the Night. When Louise talks about her own sire, she states that she was looking for someone with the same glint in her eyes, hinting at the wish to find a reincarnation of her former companion.
• Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior: It's implied that Shen and Wendy's previous incarnations were more than just teacher and student, judging by how easily they get close to each other in such a short amount of time (though Shen does admit Wendy is "different" from her previous incarnations). If that's true, nothing ever came of it because Shen was always fated to die against Yan-lo. When Wendy says Screw Destiny and saves Shen from his fate, Yan-lo is destroyed, and they are finally able to enjoy their last life together.
• They did this same thing in What Dreams May Come. He loves her so much, he's able to pull her out of Hell, something thought to be impossible, and they live together in heaven until they decide to reincarnate, and find each other again as children.
  • In an alternate ending for the movie (included on the DVD/BluRay release), their reincarnation is forced upon them as a kind of "atonement" for her condemnation to Hell. They both know going into it, however, that they're destined to meet and fall in love again — they even know the age they'll be when they die this next time around.

Literature

• Spider Robinson used this in a short story about what happens when you combine reincarnation with cryogenics (with some Wife Husbandry mixed in).
• The Allan Quatermain novels Ancient Allan and Allan And The Ice Gods reveal that Allan and Luna, Lady Ragnall were previously Count Shabaka and Princess Amada in Ancient Egypt, and Wi and Laleela in prehistory. Interestingly, Quatermain and Lady Ragnall don't have a relationship in the present day; in fact Allan finds his vision of Shabaka and Amada so awkward that he avoids meeting her again.
• The Romance Novel And Gold Was Ours has a similar scenario, where the heroine dreams of a couple that resembles her and the hero, seeing them in caveman days, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, etc. She too comes to the conclusion that after much tragedy—one or the other or both has died in every vignette—that they have finally been brought together.
• In Avalon High, there are elements of this. The characters are reincarnations of those from Arthurian legend, so the romances in Arthur legend apply to their reincarnations.
• Rao Raghunth in Belisarius Series wishes for this when he thinks he will be parted for life from the Princess Shakuntala. As it turns out, it wasn't necessary.
• A verse of the Chaurapanchasika^note Translation by Dawn Corrigan mentions this trope:
  Still I watch over her as she sleeps
  within a thicket formed of sheets and clothes,
  her slender body worn out by our love.
  In all my lives she’ll be the only dawn.
• In Dorothy Gilman's The Clairvoyant Countess, Joe Painter's song is about a tragic example, prophesied to end in tragedy three times before they get their happy ending. A fortune-teller tells the man in question that their current incarnation is a tragic one.
• Haik and Mirasol have this combined with Mayfly–December Romance in The Crocodile God. Haik is the titular Crocodile-God of the ancient Tagalog tribe in the Philippines, constantly searching for the human Mirasol as his closest follower and wife. Unfortunately, the islands' centuries of colonization have slowly left Haik depressed from his steadily-dwindling number of followers, and outright traumatized from what happened in the newly-colonized Philippines: Mirasol's Spanish employer shot her while she was pregnant and caused their whale-goddess daughter to be stillborn. In 2017, when Mirasol is a Filipino-American in California, she's now the last of his followers left and Haik's given up trying to break the cycle of loss because he doesn't want to risk going off-script and losing her PERMANENTLY.
• In Daniel Faust, The Witch and her Knight, characters in the First Story, are destined to meet and fall in love. Since every character in the story reincarnates, they do too. In the series, they are Vanessa Roth and Marie Reinhart respectively.
• Kind of the central premise of Katherine Kerr's Deverry series. Only the point is to break the cycle. 'Cuz the lovers tend to mess up a lot along the way.
  • Interestingly, of the original Love Triangle, the man who originally won then lost the girl is the one who is not reincarnated but becomes immortal but not unaging, and so is too old for the girl each time she reincarnates (and repeatedly falls in love with his rival). Once the cycle is finally broken, both he and she die of old age and are now reincarnated and Happily Married. It's the other guy who's now unnaturally long-lived...
  • And there's the girl's brother who keeps getting reincarnated. Who also deeply loved her.
• In Digital Devil Story, the protagonists are the reincarnations of Izanagi and Izanami.
• Discworld subverts this in a similar manner, where the local Romeo and Juliet Expies would have been Star-Crossed Lovers but they were born centuries apart. On different continents. It's a testament to the power of their love (which never happened) that people still remember...er, speak of it.
• This is part of the backstory for two main characters of the classic Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber.
• The Eternal Ones by Kirsten Miller combines this with a Conspiracy Thriller plot (which is smashing) and with a mystery involving the main character being murdered in her last life (which tips its hand a little bit too much).
• The Green Hills series is about two ancient dragons who are repeatedly reincarnated as humans. They long to be together, but the world usually finds ways to keep them apart.
• In Guild Hunter we have Dmitri and Honor, the latter being the reincarnation of the former's first wife and One True Love.
• In the Heralds of Valdemar, reincarnation is very common but normally there's no way of telling who was who, as very little memory remains. Virtuous humans may become horse-shaped Companions, who take names very similar to their human ones. Companions do not advertise their nature, though it's an Open Secret that they're spirits, partly to avoid just this trope although usually enough time has passed that their loved ones have also died. At least two people who were Friends with Benefits do incarnate as Companions and presumably continue to enjoy those benefits.
  • In the Last Herald-Mage Trilogy Stefan is the reincarnation of Tylendel, who died tragically when both he and his lover Vanyel Ashkevron were teenagers and lingers as a ghost for a few years before being reborn. Seventeen years later, he successfully courts the now-legendary Herald-Mage Vanyel, by this time in his mid-thirties.
• The House of Night:
  • Kalona with Zoey. Unfortunately, Zoey wasn't exactly human in her last life, and Kalona doesn't really get that the girl who was literally created to love him (It Makes Sense in Context) now has free will. And that they're on opposite sides of a war. Cue very creepy dream-stalking.
  • A reciprocal example is Lenobia and Martin. They met as teenagers in 1788^note As detailed in the prequel Lenobia's Vow, but Martin died soon after Lenobia was Marked as a vampire fledging. Around 200 years later, he was reborn.
• I Became the Wife of the Monstrous Crown Prince: Anthia and Blake are the reincarnations of Laontel and Rakshul. They were lovers in their previous lives, but Laontel's evil childhood friend Phillip created a plague that killed Rakshul in order to have Laontel all to himself. Anthia and Blake are Happily Married, but Richard, Phillip's reincarnation, is trying to split them apart again. After many challenges, Anthia and Blake do get to stay together in their current lives.
• In Alyson Noel's Immortals series, Ever falls in love with Damen everytime she reincarnates. Justified in that Damen, being immortal, actually seeks out each of her new incarnations.
• Peter David played with Arthur and Guinivere being this sort of love in Knight Life Series. When Arthur turns up in present-day New York, he finds a woman named Gwen Devere Queen. You can pretty much guess what happens from there, including her rat of a boyfriend Lance (soon to be a literal rat).
• Done and mixed with Rape Is Love on Laura Esquivel's Law of Love. Apparently, if a guy brutally rapes you and keeps you as his Sex Slave, it means that he's your soulmate.
• Married Thrice To Salted Fish has an unusual example in that only one half of the couple gets reincarnated and they do it three times within the span of just a handful of years: the first time as a terminally ill nobleman who lives for only about a year after getting married, the second time as a powerful general who marries the same man his first reincarnation was married to and lives for a couple more years before dying in battle, and the third and final time as the Emperor who pulls some political strings to be able to marry his love a third time.
• This applies to almost everyone in Memory by Linda Nagata. Each person is bound to one and only one person, who they must track down again and again after each death and reincarnation. When members of such relationships meet up, the physical attraction is so strong that they're forced to love each other. For complicated reasons, the main character has two partners, one of them an imperfect match. Her brother, who had no past lives and will apparently never reincarnate, probably doesn't have any partner, and the same goes for anyone whose partner is Deader than Dead.
• Done in Midnight Bayou, with Declan and Lena, who were Lena's great-grandparents a few generations back. Though they are surprised to find out that Declan was Lena's great-grandmother rather than great-grandfather.
• Subverted in The Mists of Avalon: Uther and Igraine were lovers centuries ago in a past life, which explains how quickly they get to know each other and fall in love in their present lives, but it turns out that this is actually a punishment - they were a priest and priestess in their past lives who broke their vows to their Gods, and the Gods cursed them to be constantly reborn into the world with all its sufferings, meeting each other over and over in every incarnation but never reaching enlightenment.
• Downplayed and combined with Reincarnation Friendship in My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!. Catarina's friend Sophia is actually the reincarnation of Atsuko, her best friend in her previous life (a fact both remain unaware of due to Atsuko's memories remaining mostly dormant). The main difference in their current relationship compared to their past one is that Sophia is in love with Catarina, while Atsuko's feelings were strictly platonic... presumably.
• The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson: the romance that drives the plot, sending the narrator on a quest across the Mordor-like far future wasteland, is one of these, over a time span long enough for the earth to stop rotating and the sun and every star in the universe to die.
• The Night World has this halfway. Vampires who are soulmates with a human tend to find that their soulmate is an "Old Soul", a person who reincarnates. In the case of Thierry and his soulmate, this is confirmed, and in the case of Ash and Mary-Lynette, we just get the implication, as he notes that both Mary-Lynette and another old soul have the same look of age in their eyes, and then walks off happily. In theory, there is probably at least one pair of two old souls, but the readers aren't shown any. This is slightly different than their The Vampire Diaries and The Secret Circle novel counterparts.
• In The Obsidian Trilogy, after Idalia's Heroic Sacrifice, she gets reincarnated as the daughter of the Elf Queen, so that she and her elven soulmate can be together for a full elven lifespan and avert the Mayfly–December Romance they'd feared.
• On Fire's Wings had an interesting example that also crossed incest territory.
• In The Participants by Brian Blose, Hess and Elza meet at the end of the first world and then spend the next 144 worlds finding one another to continue their relationship. This is complicated when Hess suppresses his memories following torture.
• In L. Jagi Lamplighter's Prospero's Daughter, Maria, Eramus's first wife tried to invoke this with her immortal husband. Unfortunately, he was so caught up in The Mourning After that he was always cruel to her until she no longer wanted to deal with him.
• There is a teen fiction novel by Suzanne Weyn aptly named Reincarnation. The two main characters are reincarnated (along with their two friends/enemies) over and over until they finally get it right in the modern world. Done beautifully, mainly because she writes every single one of the couples' lives as though they were short stories. Of course there are gender and racial flips, and they don't always die at the same time. In one lifetime, the usually-female soul meets two different incarnations of the usually-male soul: first as her lover who dies tragically young during WWII, and later as a young man who becomes a close friend in her old age. It is really amazing.
• The Rise of Kyoshi: Variant, combined with Love Father, Love Son. Avatar Kuruk fell in love with his friend Hei-Ran, but since she was married and happy he was convinced to keep quiet; he died shortly after. His reincarnation, Kyoshi, falls in love with Hei-Ran's daughter Rangi, who is repeatedly stated to be basically identical to her mother in every way that matters.
• Creepy version from the Sammy Keyes series: Sammy's mom, an actress, gets a fake ID so she can claim to be younger. Unfortunately, her new birthdate is the day her boss's wife died, and he not only thinks she's a reincarnation of his wife, he's ready to kill them both to facilitate a reincarnation romance.
• The Secret Circle: Adam and Cassie are destined soul mates who, like their Vampire Diaries novel counterparts, are bound together by a silver cord or string.
• She codifies this trope and plays it for horror. The titular character, Ayesha, is an egotistical, psychopathic Yandere who murdered her lover in a jealous fit, then became immortal so she could wait for him to be reborn. Unfortunately, he did not remember her (it's left ambiguous whether this trope was really occurring, or it was all in Ayesha's head) and hooked up with someone else. Ayesha...was not pleased.
• In the Romance Novel The Silver Witch, the hero and heroine arrive at an abandoned house and are immediately struck by the sensation that they've lived there before. Throughout the book, each of them finds themself knowing things about the house that they couldn't possibly have known, having wrong name outbursts—he calls her "Amanda", she calls him "Beau" when their names are "Connor" and "Ashley", and they each have flashbacks or visions of the couple in question. They soon learn that the pair was murdered there 100 years ago and conclude that they are their reincarnations.
• In The Supervillainy Saga, specifically Cindy's Seven, Cindy is revealed to be the reincarnation of Red Sindi from the Hyborian Age (about 10,000 years earlier). Furthermore, it is revealed that Red Sindi was married to a wizard named Gariel, which is pretty similar to her present-day beau Gary the wizard's name.
• The Tairen Soul series imply that Fey are reincarnated; Ellysetta dreams about a man she recognizes as Rain (her present-day lover) even though he looks different and has a different name. And the dreams are set several thousand years ago, before either of them were even born. (Typically for the trope, Ellysetta and Rain are canonically soulmates.)
• The novel Time and Time Again features this, with the added bonus that (a) the guy remembers all of his past lives while the girl does not, and (b) he murdered her in a past life. And can't get over it.
• In The Vampire Diaries novel series, Stefan and Elena are destined soulmates who are bound together heart to heart by a silver cord.
• Birgitte Trahelion and Gaidal Cain in The Wheel of Time. Lanfear and Rand are an interesting aversion, as well. Rand is the reincarnation of the long-dead Lews Therin Telamon, who once had a relationship with Lanfear. She sincerely believes in their Reincarnation Romance despite the fact that she, in fact, is immortal and thus never actually reincarnated. He sincerely wishes that this crazy bitch would go away and stop calling him by someone else's name.
• Wolves of the Beyond has Fengo and Stormfast, who eventually get reincarnated as main characters Faolan and Edme respectively. Strangely, they took different numbers of reincarnations to get there.
• In J. R. R. Tolkien's world, this is the norm for elves. They are immortal within the lifespan of the world, and their souls are designed to stay in the world for as long as it lasts. As described in "Laws and Customs of the Eldar", elves generally get reincarnated with full memories if they die, and previously married ones inevitably feel drawn to their spouse. Refusing reincarnation and remarriage is a big deal and can cause serious problems.
• Tom Holt's You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps features a spin on this in which every reincarnation ends up with Star-Crossed Lovers.

Live-Action TV

• Brazilian soap Alma Gêmea has this as its primary theme. The story begins when Luna, love interest of the male protagonist Rafael, is shot and winds up reincarnated as the female protagonist, a biracial indigenous woman named Serena, who eventually ends up in the city the story takes place in and falls for Rafael. In the end, Serena and Rafael both die, but fall in love everytime they reincarnate.
• In the Arrowverse, Kendra Saunders, aka Hawkgirl, and Carter Hall, aka Hawkman, are lovers who've been with each other since ancient Egypt, finding each other only to end up being killed again and again by Vandal Savage.
  • Their relationship is so strong that, as a prior incarnation tells Kendra when they are in the Old West, any relationship other than with Carter (she is starting one with Ray) is doomed to end in tragedy. The older "Kendra" is living alone, just waiting to die and meet "Carter" in her next life.
• While we don't see one on-screen, the Minbari of Babylon 5 believe that groups of souls can be bound together to relive great relationships or repair bad ones.
• Saul and Ellen in Battlestar Galactica. Twist: they're passionately in love but also bad influences on each other! Their equivalent of foreplay is borderline spousal abuse. She induces him to alcoholism and his presence tends to bring her manipulative and ambitious sides out. The interesting twist comes from him meeting and falling in love with another woman because he thought Ellen was dead. You can guess how things went when it turned out she's a Cylon and resurrected.
  • Subverted with Tyrol and Tory. Despite being engaged and madly in love the first time around, he shows no interest in her during the series. In fact, when he finds out that she killed Cally, he kills her on the spot.
• In an episode of Blood Ties (2007), Vicki is hired by a teenaged boy who's looking for his reincarnated lover. They always die together in every life, and they have a deal to meet up at a certain tree in the next; the tree has been replaced by a shopping mall, and he can't find his lover. Turns out the car accident that killed her past self put his past self in a coma for several years before he actually died, so she was reborn years before he was; since he never showed, she's married to another man and is pregnant with his child. The boy tries to kill his lover so that they can start over with a new tree and get it right this time, but Vicki and the woman are able to convince him to move on, arguing that maybe the reason they always keep dying is that they're not really meant to be together.
• Charmed had Piper and Leo falling in love in a past life. Leo didn't tell Piper since it would be awkward. Especially since, in the past life, they were broken up and she was dating a past life of her current boyfriend. In that episode it was a problem since Phoebe's past life was turned evil by an immortal warlock whom was feared to follow her in all future lives, as it was belived to be true love, and turn her evil. So they cursed her to die young.
• Downplayed in Dark Shadows. Barnabas, the immortal vampire from 1795, falls in love with various reincarnations of his star-crossed love Josette. His attempts at romancing all of them except Kitty fail, and Barnabas is ultimately unsuccessful at reuniting with Josette.
• Doctor Who:
  • A variation, as the Doctor's Bizarre Alien Biology allows him to transform into a completely new person with a completely different personality upon death. "School Reunion" dealt with the Tenth Doctor meeting Sarah Jane, a companion of his Fourth incarnation in the 70s. While this episode makes it canon that the Fourth Doctor had been in love with her (something implied but never made clear in the original series) the fact that the Tenth Doctor is completely different to the Fourth Doctor makes the relationship basically impossible to rekindle, and very bittersweet, though they clearly still love each other very much on some level.
  • Averted with River Song, who writes in her diary in "The Eternity Clock" how excited she was to use time travel to go and meet the Doctor's previous incarnations, apparently expecting to be in love with all of them, and being eager to see "the face of her beloved in his first incarnation". She discovers to her horror that not only does she not have any sexual chemistry with the First Doctor (an extremely rude old man she compares to Albert Steptoe) but that he isn't even fun, living in a scrapyard and hanging around with schoolteachers and his granddaughter, which she claims not to be ready for. Later entries in her diary indicate that her opinions of each incarnation of the Doctor go up and down — for instance, she seems to rather like the Fourth Doctor (or at least she likes his hair), hate the Second Doctor (she wishes he'd choke on his recorder) and really get on with the Third, with whom she swaps fashion and hair tips (although she takes care to erase their memories of her so that it will preserve the timeline).
• Dollhouse has the sci-fi variant with Victor and Sierra. No matter how many times their personalities are deleted, no matter who they're programmed to be, they fall in love with each other, every time. This serves as powerful evidence against the Dollhouse's claim to be able to programme genuine emotions- at one point Victor breaks up with the woman he's programmed to be in love with, because even though this incarnation has never met Sierra he knows there's somebody out there who he loves more.
• Dracula (2013): Dracula and Mina are drawn to each other. She's the reincarnation of his deceased wife, and her spitting image.
• Friends plays with this regarding Monica and Chandler. While not a reincarnation romance, there's an alternate universe episode where both characters, despite significant differences, still fall in love and end up together. So they've been together across time, rather than through it. On the commentary Word of God states the episode showed "they were meant for each other."
• Guardian: The Lonely and Great God: Between Sunny and Wang Yeo. They don't end up together in this life either, but the finale shows them reincarnated again as ordinary humans and this time they appear to be hitting it off smoothly.
• Haven has a one-sided example, with Audrey and Nathan being the Official Couple, and two of Audrey's past selves being drawn to him when he travels back in time. Audrey eventually uses this Love Transcends Space Time thing to get around her Heroic Sacrifice: she couldn't come back as Audrey, but comes back as Paige, knowing that she and Nathan will fall in love all over again. Interestingly, Audrey's original personality, Mara, doesn't even like him, though she retains enough of Audrey in her Split-Personality Takeover arc to not kill him.
• Subverted in Hotel del Luna, contrary to most Korean dramas. Chan-sung is not the reincarnation of Man-wol's first love Chung-myung, though Chan-sung and Man-wol are revealed to be Connected All Along, as his past incarnation and Man-wol had met as children. Also the current reincarnation of Princess Song-hwa previously dated Chan-sung and she later falls in love with the current incarnation of Yeon-woo, when in her past life, she pined over Chung-myung who is not seen to have reincarinated because his soul stayed by Man-wol's side as a firefly for over a thousand years.
• Kamen Rider Wizard suggests that Haruto and Koyomi had or would have fallen in love. This trope is subverted in a tie-in novel, set two years after the ending of the show, which implies Koyomi is eventually reborn as Haruto's daughter with Rinko.
• Lois & Clark, in the episode "Soul Mates", turn out to have previously been Lady Loisette and Sir Charles/the Fox in The Middle Ages; and Lulu and a mild-mannered telegraph operator/the Lone Rider in The Wild West.
• Love and Redemption: The God of War and the Star of Mo Sha fell in love over 1,000 years ago. Their reincarnations Xuan Ji and Si Feng fall in love again. And their meeting in episode one is actually the meeting of their tenth reincarnations.
• Colombian soap La Otra Mitad Del Sol, which also involves the protagonists getting matching jewelry who were from their previous incarnations/lives, in this case a split sun-shaped medallion from which each lover has one half.
• In Penny Dreadful, Vanessa is the reincarnation of the Egyptian goddess Amunet, and it is implied she has reincarnated several other times throughout history, with Lucifer and Dracula attempting to make each of her incarnations their Dark Mistress and Apocalypse Maiden. It is also implied that Ethan has reincarnated several times as Vanessa's divine protector, and possible Eternal Love interest.
  Ferdinand Lyle: The Demon, the Hound, the Scorpion. Endlessly circling one another.
• The Secret Circle: Similar to that of Stefan/Elena from The Vampire Diaries, Adam and Cassie are said to be destined or written in the stars. This implies that the two have reincarnated in lifetime after lifetime and have spent many lifetimes together as soulmates.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine plays with this trope occasionally with Dax and the other Trills, humanoid aliens with slug-like symbionts. When one host body grows old and dies, the slug can be implanted in a new host, bringing along the accumulated memories and personalities of the old hosts, to merge with that of the new host. A couple of times, slugs who fell in love with one generation of hosts will meet up generations later and fall in love again, occasionally with gender switches. Leads to Star Trek's first girl-girl kiss in "Rejoined".
  • Possibly subverted by the fact that relationships between future hosts of the same symbiont pair is forbidden by Trill law, and breaking that law means that the symbionts will not be transferred to new hosts when their current ones die, greatly discouraging Reincarnation Romance and ensuring that it will only occur once per couple if it happens at all, which is odd when you consider the recurring theme that there aren't enough Trill symbionts to go around to begin with.
    • Arguably a Trill-symbiont law that the humanoid half of the society accepts as the symbionts' right to decide for themselves. Surely the slugs have the right to determine their own species' rules?
    • OTOH, that rule was a major law in one episode ("Rejoined" again), and never mentioned before (or since?). It had been broken more than once before it showed up, including in the first Trill episode ("The Host", Star Trek: The Next Generation).
    • The whole reason for "Rejoined" was that the writers wanted to create an LGBT-issues episode in The '90s, despite full in-story acceptance of LGBT in everyday Federation life. So the in-universe argument became about a written-in issue in Trill culture about not romantically associating with partners from past lives, framing it for a decidedly human audience by gender flipping only one of the new hosts.
• Played with to hell and back in A Tale of Thousand Stars. Tian has gotten Torfun’s heart from a transplant. Torfun loved Phupha, but he only saw her as a sister. Tian feels confused about whether his feelings are Torfun’s or his own. Phupha feels confused about loving Tian who’s so similar to Torfun. The more rational characters pour cold water all over any reincarnation mysticism. Yes, Torfun loved Phupha, but so does Tian. And unlike Torfun, Phupha loves Tian back. Tian’s life is his own, and though he has honored Torfun’s memory, he isn’t Torfun and has to live for himself. Phupha doesn’t just love what he sees of Torfun in Tian, he loves Tian and wants to be with him, not her.
• Ultraman Orb has the titular Ultra, prior to the series, failing to save his sweetheart, Natasha, a hundred years ago, which is caused by the Ultra destroying Maga-Zetton resulting in a huge explosion which results in the Ultra-verse's equivalent to The Tunguska Event. But in the present, Orb later finds out not only did Natasha survive the incident, she goes on to have descendants, one of them, Naomi Yumeno, who ends up as Orb's love interest in the show.
• The Vampire Diaries: Stefan and Elena's relationship on the show series is primarily built from this trope, mostly because of their novel counterparts, which feature Stefan/Elena as the destined pairing in the books tied together by a silver cord of destiny, indicating that the two are soul mates and have reincarnated lifetime after lifetime. This is even more emphasized in season five, when it is discovered that they are spawned from an ancient true love story of over 2,000 + years between their ancestors, Silas/Amara.
• The reincarnated Knight in The Wanderer discovers that his true love, the Lady Clare, has also returned. Unfortunately so has his bitch-sorceress of a wife.
• In What We Do in the Shadows (2019) Nadja has romanced the soul she first knew as the knight Gregor many times. The main obstacle to their love isn't that he's mortal and she's vampire, but that Gregor for some reason gets decapitated in every single life (including the time Nadja got a little overexcited and did it herself.
• The Wheel of Time (2021): It turns out that Lanfear once was lovers with Lews Therin, the Dragon who is now reborn as Rand millennia later. She's still obsessed with him and had seduced Rand pretending to be Selene, hoping to win him back.
• Xena: Warrior Princess: Xena and Gabrielle are soulmates who will find each other in every lifetime. They even get married in one of their modern incarnations. The bodies get shuffled around though, with Joxer of all people as the third member.
• The X-Files:
  • "The Field Where I Died" has a scene in which Mulder, under hypnosis, recounts that he, his sister, Scully, and Cancer Man have been reincarnated into each other's lives over several lifetimes and are always related, and Cancer Man is always evil. Mulder's supposed soul-mate-in-every-life is a woman named Melissa who also channels a guy called Sidney and Lily, a little girl. It's kind of weird that they are supposed to be that close all the time, and here she's one-off character who's hard to relate to. This kind of falls apart when Mulder talks about being a Jewish woman and Cancer Man being a concentration camp guard in WW2. Being in his fifties/sixties in the '90s means Cancer Man would have already been alive during the war, as either a child or a teenager and could not have been in the big evil guy in the concentration camp. However, there's also no stated rule that reincarnation is strictly linear in this case — it's possible he was reincarnated into a body that was born several years before the last one dies. Timey-wimey.
  • Inverted in the episode "Hellbound". A serial killer has been skinning his victims and claimed 4 of them so far. Assisted by the local detective Van Allen, Reyes investigated the case. Looking into the archives, they found that similar incidents have occurred every generation; each time 4 victims, all skinned. Going as far as they could, they found an earliest known case where there was only one victim skinned by 4 robbers. The detective turned out to be the killer, and the original victim - but he couldn't let go of his resentment, it tainted all his future incarnations and always seeking to commit revenge on his tormentors across lifetimes. As added bonus, in his dying breath he remarked how Reyes 'always fails to stop the murders', as Reyes is the reincarnation of the sheriff who failed to solve the case.

Manhua

• The main plot and several subplots in Fox Spirit Matchmaker revolve around spirits/ demons and their reincarnated human lovers.

Manhwa

• Flowers of Evil: The manga starts off with the story of two lovers who are reincarnated as twins. This is what the twin protagonists like to believe has happened to them.
• Si-Joon Lee and Mu-Yeon Park from Pig Bride are the reincarnations of their ancestors, Si-Baek Li and his wife Lady Park.
• In The Tarot Cafe, Aaron turns out near the end to be Nebiros's angelic (and previously female) lover reborn. It seems to help them reconcile after being estranged in their first focus story.

Music

• The Dream Theater album Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory tells the story of Nicholas, who goes to a hypnotherapist to learn about his past life. In a previous life, Nicholas was Victoria, who was killed by her lover Julian in a murder-suicide. Then we find out that the hypnotherapist is the reincarnation of Victoria's other lover, Julian's brother Edward, who is the real killer of both Julian and Victoria. And the hypnotherapist kills Nicholas to continue the cycle. Maybe he's still angry that Victoria left him?
• Michael Jackson 's song This Is It seems to be indicating this.
• The Barenaked Ladies song "It's All Been Done", which even speculates on the future lives of the singer and his love.
• The song "The Crossing" by the band The Action Design is about this, and seems to indicate that their current incarnations may not be able to be together for long in this lifetime. But there's always the next one, if worse comes to worst.
• "In Another Life" by Vienna Teng is an Earn Your Happy Ending take on it, in which the lovers keep dying miserably in different lives while dreaming of being together in a better one. The last verse has them meet on a sunny afternoon and realize they are finally in the better life they wanted.
• "The Truth" by India.Arie touches on this a little, as part of the song's True Love theme.
• "Next Lifetime" by Erykah Badu is about meeting a love-worthy man after she's committed to someone else, with the chorus suggesting that perhaps their timing will be better next time. The music video, however, plays the reincarnation theme more strongly, where she and her love interest are shown together in multiple time periods, including ancient Africa, the Civil Rights Movement, and the distant future.
• Implied in the video for Taylor Swift's "Love Story," with the two lovers meeting in Regency England, and then seemingly recognizing each other in the present.
• "Past Lives" by Kesha is about a woman and her lover who reincarnate throughout the ages, sometimes losing each other but finding each other again. She even speculates at one point that they were together as stardust when the universe formed.
• The video for "Entertainment" by Phoenix depicts three different time periods: old Korea, North Korea (who can ever tell the time period there...), and modern South Korea. Several couples meet across the eras, but only a few of them work out in the end, and only after suffering.
• "Hands on Me" by Vanessa Carlton. At least from the video, which shows multiple pairs of lovers cycling through.
• Implied in the KISS song "Odyssey" from Music from "The Elder": "Once upon not yet, long ago someday, countless times we met, met along the way."
• One popular interpretation (or at least popular in FanVids) of Christina Perri's "A Thousand Years" is that it's about one half of this trope singing about meeting the other in her next life.
• Discussed in "So Long, Goodbye" by 10 Years. The singer feels he and his love are too different to be together, but he wishes they could be together in another life.
• An odd combination of this and Adam and Eve Plot occurs in the music video of Breaking Benjamin's "Ashes of Eden". An Ancient Astronaut attempts to rescue her partner who's plummeting to Earth. She fails and they both perish. Their ashes give then birth to organic life. Cue present day where they meet as humans.
• "In Another Life" by Ashlee Simpson is about someone who feels like the person they're in love with was their lover in a past lifetime as well.
• "Circle" by Harry Chapin (and covered by The New Seekers) contains a verse about this: "I've found you a thousand times, I guess you've done the same, But then we'll lose each other, It's just like a children's game, As I see you here again, The thought runs through my mind, Our love is like a circle, Let's go round one more time."

Myths & Religion

• A few examples from Hindu Mythology:
  • Shiva's first wife Sati committed suicide by burning herself alive (because her father did not approve of her marriage to Shiva) with hopes she would be able to remarry Shiva in her next life (she does).
  • Another example is the death of Kama, the god of Love, because he interfered with Shiva's meditation. His wife pleads with Shiva who promises her that he would be reincarnated. He is reincarnated as Avatar Krishna's son. Ironically, Kama had interrupted his meditaton to get the catatonically depressed Shiva to notice and fall in love with Parvati, whom he was ignoring.
• An old Japanese myth says that if two star-crossed lovers commit dual suicide, they get reincarnated as twins.
• There is, apparently, a Wiccan spell that makes it so that you and your lover will be together forever (Marriage is considered temporary, since it's only till death). Thus, when you two get reincarnated, you will be together, again and again (well, if it works, anyway). The problem is, it's very hard to reverse, and a person's personality changes when they get reincarnated. This is not recommended, especially if you're only dating, since it pretty much screws you over in your next life. Of course, that doesn't mean people wouldn't be stupid enough to try it.
• Norse Mythology: Poetic Edda says that the valkyrie Sváfa/Sigrún/Kára and her lover Helgi were reincarnated three times as lovers, always meeting a tragic end.
  • The third time might have been the one which ended happily, but unfortunately the final installment Káruljóð is a case of Missing Episode referred to by the complier: he added an epilogue to explain that the story actually continued.
• Irish Mythology: The Wooing of Étaín tells how Etain, the wife of Midir of the Aos Sidhe, was turned into a fly which was accidentally swallowed by the wife of Etar. She became pregnant by it, and gave birth to the reborn Etain. Midir eventually recognized his wife and took her with him to the land of the Sidhe.

Pro Wrestling

• Winter's goal in TNA wrestling was to get Angelina Love to remember that her past lives, where the two had supposedly been lovers, and get rid of distractions like The Beautiful People\Velvet Sky. Love never seemed to recall this but did come to "understand" and for lack of a better term, "date" Winter.

Radio

• Discussed in a Japanese Pokémon: The Series radio drama. Musashi and Kojiro play two lovers named "Jessie" and "James" who are the Sole Survivors of a ship crash. As their oxygen depletes, the duo reminisce on their lives together. A dying Jessie mentions that it was destiny that they met and that they will meet again someday.

Tabletop Games

• The Curse of Strahd module has a dark example in Strahd's obsession with Tatyana, who he considers his one true love. While he was still mortal, Strahd fell madly in love with Tatyana who in turn had chosen to marry Strahd's brother. When Strahd killed his brother to claim her, Tatyana committed suicide to escape him only for her soul to be trapped in Barovia. Each time Tatyana reincarnates Strahd attempts to capture and wed her, regardless of what she thinks, only for her to be lost to him before he can succeed due to his curse.
• Happens with Solars and Lunars in Exalted. All Celestial Exalted reincarnate after death (well, it's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the gist of it), and every Solar is bonded to a specific Lunar and vice versa. Such pairs are referred to as mates. Despite the name, it doesn't have to be a romantic relationship; any strong emotional bond can apply, ranging from close friendship to intense hatred. If they're even remotely compatible with one another, though, chances are good that it'll be this. Of course, this isn't exclusive to Solars and Lunars; all Celestial Exalted have memories from past lives, and it's entirely possible to run into a reincarnated lover.
  • There are also a number of subversions. For instance, each Lunar may be bonded with a Solar Exaltation and serve as that incarnation's boon companion... but half those shards have been corrupted by the Neverborn or the Yozi, meaning their mate is now bent towards hideous atrocities. However, this has been reconstructed, in that Abyssals (the ones corrupted by the Neverborn) can fight for and protect their Lunar mate without suffering Resonance, and it's been suggested a number of Infernals (the ones corrupted by the Yozis) will drop their masters' plans like a hot potato once they run into their Lunar mates.
    • Also, the most outstanding example in canon for a Solar/Lunar pair reunited by time is Swan and Lilith. Thing is, Lilith lived through the intervening time period, and remembers everything that Desus, Swan's past incarnation, did to her...
  • Alchemical Exalted likewise get a background that allows them to remember the past lives their heroic soul lived before it was put into a Champion of the State. It often allows them to reunite with old friends and lovers, and helps to resist the encroachment of Clarity.
• It's not uncommon for innerwalkers in Feng Shui to fall in love with past and future incarnations of love interests, or vice versa.
• One fan-setting for Mutants & Masterminds combined the backstory of Scarab (Freedom City's Expy of Hawkman) with that of Red Phoenix (a reincarnating Magical Girl Warrior from Silver Age Sentinels), giving them a Carter-and-Shiera-style Reincarnation Romance. The twist is that in the Silver Age this became a May–December Romance, with the middle-aged Scarab trying to hide his feelings for the 20something reincarnation of his lost love from the Golden Age. Then in the Modern Age, Red Phoenix finds herself in a similar situation with the "new" Scarab.
• Princess: The Hopeful: In her very first life, the Princess who would later become the Queen of Hearts fell in love with and married a young Prince. And ever since, whenever one is reborn the other will shortly follow, and in every life they have met, fallen in love, and wed anew. Neither has ever once loved another, or betrayed their vows.
• In Vampire: The Requiem, elder vampires run into a strange phenomenon called an Inamorata, a person too exactly like someone extremely dear to the vampire to be a coincidence, centuries after that person died. Drinking their blood makes a vampire feel human again, though in actuality they lose their vampire powers without losing their weaknesses and banes. Very, very old vampires run into the same Inamorata again and again over the centuries.

Theatre

• The Musical Aida, based on Verdi's opera, added an epilogue in which this happens to turn the original Downer Ending into a Bittersweet Ending. It's made even better by the fact that the ending is part of the framing device of the show (people are milling around a modern-day museum with Egyptian artifacts) and the audience has pretty much forgotten about the beginning in the wake of what they expect to be the Downer Ending. As such, when Aida and Radames die Together in Death, the audience thinks the show is over...until the curtain rises on the museum and their reincarnations meet.
• Prince Kaguya: In the epilogue, Kaguya and San are reborn and are able to be together as Shouta Aoi and his manager.

Video Games

• 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim Played straight, averted and even zigzagged.
  • Straight: Miura and Natsuno, as well as Takatoshi and Okino become couples at the end, much like their original Project Ark counterparts. There's also an one-sided example with Ryoko Shinonome, who has a crush on Tetsuya Ida (both in 2188 and in the virtual world), which sorta extends to the Ida's younger self, Shu.
  • Averted: Shu and Tomi, who were a couple in the previous loop, end up with Yuki and Nenji respectively in the current one.
  • Zigzagged: Juro Izumi and Chihiro Morimura were both in love, and it's implied this was the case for their original Project Ark selves as well, Major Izumi and Professor Morimura (if Gouto is to be believed). However, Juro Kurabe and Iori Fuyusaka, their current loop versions, end up with completely different people by the end.
• In Asura's Wrath, the titular character's wife, Durga, gets killed at the end of the second chapter, while Asura himself dies at the end of the game. In The Stinger, it's revealed that the two have reincarnated into the modern day, once again as husband and wife.
• In BlazBlue, Hakumen's long-lost lover was an alternate version of Tsubaki Yayoi, and bad things happened to the two after the timeline was modified. In the present, the normally super cold and Lawful Neutral Hakumen is shocked when he sees Tsubaki, and asks her to get up close so he can see her face clearly...
• Castlevania has the pretty widespread fanon assumption that just as Soma Cruz in Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow is the reincarnation of Dracula, Mina Hakuba is similarly the reincarnation of Dracula's two previous wives, Elisabetha Cronqvist and Lisa, with the primary "proof" being that her name is an obvious take on Mina Harker, Dracula's reincarnated wife in Bram Stoker's Dracula. People who aren't fans of the Soma/Mina pairing understandably have an issue with this.
• Final Fantasy XIII-2 shows just how bad things can get if this trope is combined with Mayfly–December Romance. The one who dies young keeps coming back because she wants to be with the other, but the immortal one is eventually driven completely insane from watching his loved one die young over and over again for millennia. What makes things much worse is that said immortal is, according to Word of God, the most powerful villain in the entire franchise.
• A bit of a complicated example involving both Fire Emblem: Awakening and Fire Emblem Fates: in Awakening the Hot Witch Tharja can marry a male Avatar (hence refered to as Robin for clarity), and in Fates the Dark Magical Girl Rhajat can marry an Avatar of either gender (hence referred to as Corrin).^note And a female Corrin can be her mother, if she marries her father Hayato What makes this complicated? While it's strongly implied that Rhajat and Tharja are part of the same reincarnation cycle, and Robin and Corrin are also part of a reincarnation cycle, it's not exactly clear which couple is the Reincarnation Romance: The Rhajat-Corrin S-support implies that Tharja and Robin came first and reincarnated into Rhajat and Corrin, while Rhajat's last words, should Classic Mode be turned on, implies that she will reincarnate into Tharja instead.
  • To a lesser degree, also true for other characters from the Hoshido side: Asugi and Caeldori, who may not be as strongly implied to be the reincarnations of Gaius and Cordelia from Awakening but do share startling similarities with them. Caeldori can marry Asugi and a Male Corrin among others, plus strike an Odd Friendship with Rhajat and be either friends or mother-and-daughter with Female Corrin (if she marries Caeldori's father Subaki); on the other hand Asugi can be friends with a Male Corrin, marry either a Female Corrin, Rhajat or Caeldori, or be the son of a Female Avatar if she marries his dad Saizo. Complicating matters further in Caeldori's case is that if Subaki marries Selena, along with being Cordelia's reincarnation she'd also be Cordelia's granddaughter.
• Just like in the original series, the Fushigi Yuugi DS game Suzaku Ibun can potentially put a spin on this trope. If the Player Character Madoka falls in love with a guy from the Book World, she will generally have to leave him behind when she goes back home... unless the player gathers enough points to unlock a "Reincarnation Ending", in which the chosen boyfriend will be sent to Earth and be reunited with Madoka.
• In the Harvest Moon DS, games everyone is an Identical Grandson of the characters of AWL. In terms of the Forget-me-not Valley people, they fall in love with previous love interests. However the Mineral Town people don't have feelings for their grandparents' lovers apparently.
• The Legend of Zelda uses this with the implied romance between Link and Zelda. The backstory of Skyward Sword reveals that Link and Zelda's spirits are eternally bound by the goddess Hylia's promise to her chosen hero. Unfortunately, the Dying Curse of the demon king Demise means that they are also fated to be plagued by some incarnation of his hatred, which is typically the series' recurring Big Bad, Ganon.
  • Hyrule Warriors takes this to its logical conclusion by making Link and Zelda fall in Love at First Sight. Unfortunately this means Cia, the sorceress who developed her own crush on Link after observing him throughout history, falls into despair upon realizing she has no chance of winning his heart... resulting in her declaring war on Hyrule so she can take the Hero by force and remove the competition.
• Lufia & The Fortress of Doom and Lufia: The Legend Returns runs on a similar premise: a redhead called a descendant of the legendary hero Maxim, meets a blue haired girl who is a reincarnation of Erim the Sinistral of Death and they fall in love.
• In Metal Gear Solid, it is strongly hinted, although never outright stated, that Snake and Otacon are the reincarnations of The Joy and The Sorrow.
• Absolutely applies in Neverwinter Nights 2 Mask of the Betrayer. The PC is carrying around the spirit of Akachi, who tried to bring down the god of death to save his beloved Nefris, who survived to the present and split off an aspect of her personality to form Safiya (curiously Safiya got all of the parts of Nefris that Akachi loved best), whose romance is implied to be the canonical plot ending for a male spirit eater.
• Oracle of Tao, Anideshi is basically affected by a spell that causes her to remember her reincarnations, and keeps meeting her beloved. Supposedly, when the game starts this is her last incarnation before they pass on. Also, both of them are girls.
• Locke D'Averam and Princess Andria from Revenant are revealed to have been lovers in their previous lives late in the game, though this crosses over into Resurrected Romance, since only she is a proper reincarnation, while he is, well, a revenant.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • In Shin Megami Tensei I, this is what Yuriko thinks the Hero and the Heroine are, with herself being Lilith, while the player character is supposedly Adam while the heroine is Eve.
  • Gale and Jenna Angel, the Final Boss of the first game are ultimately revealed to be this in Digital Devil Saga, after a complicated set of reveals. Jenna Angel and David Gale were lovers, and David was killed in Angel's arms. David's soul/data went to the sun after death, where it was extracted by the Karma Society and placed in the Junkyard as a combat AI.
• Played with in Suikoden Tierkreis. Maybelle is convinced that the main character was her true love in a previous life, so they're destined to be together. He finds this incredibly creepy.^note It also helps that the entire "memories of a past life" deal turns out to be an elaborate fantasy she came up with to cope with Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory
• The keystone of the plot and theme of Tales of Innocence. Although since there's a pretty extensive Relationship Values system, maybe Asras and Inanna are crossed by more than just one bad star... ( Although Inanna murdering Asras and causing the fall of Heaven probably didn't help much.)
• Strongly implied at the end of Utawarerumono. Unfortunately, he goes back to sleep about four seconds later. And it's not entirely clear if and when he'll be back.
• Xenogears is actually a Deconstruction. While a Reincarnation Romance sounds beautiful, it has an inherent horror in that it revolves around people's loved ones dying over and over again. Fei and Elly have repeatedly found happiness with each other over the millennia of their existence, but Big Bad Miang is reincarnating as well, and ends up repeatedly killing them in horrible ways for interfering in her schemes. Only by defeating her once and for all can Fei and Elly live in peace, which they achieve at the end of the game with the help of their adopted daughter from a previous life together.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3 deconstructs this trope: it turns out that if you keep falling in love with a person over and over again, it may mean having to watch them die over and over again, eventually turning into a case of Love Makes You Evil. The original version of Noah was never able to get over his grief at repeatedly losing the original version of Mio over and over again and eventually made a Deal with the Devil, joining Moebius and helping prolong the Forever War they had previously been trying to end in exchange for making the two of them immortal. Unfortunately for him, he didn't ask her first, and when she gets the chance she pulls a Thanatos Gambit to help the protagonists, forcing him to watch her die again, this time for good.

Visual Novels

• Yukito and Misuzu in AIR are reincarnations of Ryuuya and Kanna, although their romantic relationship isn't overtly focused on. Yukito is also the descendant of Ryuuya and Uraha, their family line being dedicated to save the reincarnations of Kanna. It's also implied that after Misuzu's death and Yukito becoming a crow, that they were reincarnated again as the boy and the girl on the beach at the end.
• In Hashihime of the Old Book Town, Minakami and Tamamori have been together for billions of years, though they never managed to become a couple until his true ending.
• A recurring theme in The House in Fata Morgana.
  • Official Couple Michel and Giselle get this after Michel dies tragically and Giselle waits nearly a thousand years for his reincarnation to return to her. When Michel is finally able to free Giselle from the mansion, they both leave the afterlife to be reincarnated with their memories intact, reuniting and eventually getting married in their next life.
  • Subverted with Mell and Nellie. While Nellie's obsessive Big Brother Attraction is present in all her lives, Mell never reciprocates and is disgusted each time he discovers the romantic nature of her feelings. The epilogue of the main game suggests that Nellie will finally win his heart when their final reincarnations are shown to be strangers, but the sequel shuts this down when Mell turns out to be her long-lost biological brother.
  • Pauline falls in love with Yukimasa and starts a relationship with him in each of her lives, but Yukimasa is aromantic and can only pretend to return her feelings. Despite this, he cherishes her as his Morality Chain and is willing to go along with the romance to keep her happy.
  • Jacopo falls in love with Morgana and stays there the rest of his existence. While they don't get together in their first life and he marries someone else in his second, his wife turns out to be an incarnation of part of Morgana's soul, and the sequel implies that they'll get together in his third life when Morgana is of age.
• Magically done, one sided and not played for romance in Tsukihime. Whenever Roa reincarnates, he lures Arcueid to him. He thinks he hates her, but actually loves her. Arcueid actually falls in love with a third party, who stops the whole reincarnation thing and making this Reincarnation Stalker with a Crush.
• Deconstructed in Umineko: When They Cry: After Beatrice Castiglioni's Death by Childbirth, Kinzo attempted to carry on his love with their daughter due to her Strong Family Resemblance causing him to delude himself into thinking she was her own mother's reincarnation. It's all but outright stated that Kinzo raped his daughter and Beatrice III happened as a result.

Web Animation

• Played for Drama in RWBY, where a Reincarnation Romance going horribly, horribly wrong has shaped the course of human history. Long story short, Salem is a woman cursed by the gods with Complete Immortality for being unable to accept her love's death, and her actions resulted in mortals losing their magic, the death of the first population of humanity, and the departure of the gods from Remnant. Ozma, Salem's love, was later brought back by the God of Light and granted Born-Again Immortality so he could guide and redeem the second population of humanity. Despite the god's warning, Ozma's first reincarnation sought out Salem, and though each had changed, the two rekindled their relationship. Together they found happiness, forged a prosperous kingdom, and even started a family... and then their daughters developed magical powers like their parents. When Salem decided that instead of bothering with the current crop of mundane humans, she and Ozma should replace them with their own empowered descendents, the two came to blows in a battle that left Salem the sole survivor. Ever since, Ozma's reincarnations have been locked in conflict with Salem, him trying to unite and inspire humanity, while she strives to divide and destroy.

Webcomics

• Shousetsu Bang*Bang has a short comic, "25 lives," about a pair reincarnating again and again. No explanation is given, and there are lifetimes when one kills the other, or one doesn't exist, or they just miss each other.
  Even though each time, I know I'll see you again, I always wonder. Is this the last time? Is that really you? And what if you're already perfectly happy without me?
• This is a facet of Arthur, King of Time and Space. The characters exist simultaneously in multiple time periods, but most of the romances are the same in all of them, including a few cases where one or both partners is gender-swapped. (For example, Tristram and Isolde are always a couple whether Tristram is male or female.)
• Homestuck: Zig-zagged. The Trolls all have ancestors which they share genes with. Many of the ancestors' relationships manifest in different forms in their descendants.^note  Darkleer spared the Disciple, and in the present Equius and Nepeta are in a pale-rom. The Sufferer and the Disciple were in a relationship powerful enough to transcend the quadrants, but in the present Nepeta's crush on Karkat is unrequited. The Condesce had a crush on the Psiionic prolonging his life and suffering with her power, Sollux and Feferi were in a relationship. The Dolorosa was the Sufferer's surrogate mother, Kanaya tends to act motherly towards Karkat. This is invoked where Vriska and Eridan read about their ancestors relationship and try to emulate them, but it quickly falls apart. Mindfang had a relationship with the Summoner who killed her, Vriska attempts to emulate this with Tavros and she kills him. The biggest connection would be the Maryam-Serket one. Aranea and Porrim were in a relationship that ended after a year, which Aranea doesn't want to talk about The Dolorosa was raped by Mindfang in the backstory causing Mindfang to become infatuated with her, and Kanaya has a one sided crush on Vriska.
• Keychain of Creation: Marena is firmly opposed to this, and refuses any serious relationship with Misho for fear that he'll love her for who she was, not who she is.
• Leif & Thorn: Leachtric doesn't remember her past life as Rhódon, so she's not sure how to approach Rhódon's reincarnated lover.
• Alex and Alison from My Life In Blue qualify as a platonic reincarnating love.
• Referenced by the ghost of Victorian Helen in Narbonic ("kindred souls reborn many times over in similar guise. It's terribly H. Rider Haggard"), although she fails to explain how present-day Helen can be her reincarnation when she still exists as a ghost.
• Sluggy Freelance:
  • Torg is implied to be the reincarnation of a man named Lord Torgamus, the ruler of a long gone kingdom called Mercia. Lord Torgamus was married to a woman named Valerie. When he died in a weapon accident, Valerie, in her grief, accepted Lysindia's offer to become a vampire. When they meet again for the first time in the modern era, they instantly fall in love again. But this relationship ultimately ends in tragedy when Valerie insists on killing his friends, forcing Torg to stake her and leave her for the sun to finish off.
  • In the ancient past, King Farahn and Queen Siphaniana were deeply obsessed with one another, and the schemes they came up with to control one another ultimately resulted in the destruction of their kingdom. In the modern day, King Farahn and Gwynn herself believe Gwynn to be Queen Siphaniana's reincarnation. King Farahn gives Gwynn power and protects her for this reason, but also keeps her under a tight grip. And since Gwynn has not inherited Queen Siphaniana's obsession with King Farahn, she has been finding his possessiveness difficult to deal with.
• The short manga The Tsundere Wife and the Crybaby Husband ends this way, with the eponomous couple meeting again as children (but with their genders reversed) in the exact same manner they did at the beginning of the story.
  Even If I'm reborn, I still want to be with you.
• YU+ME: dream ends with Fiona and Lia deciding to leave Nod. The problem is that both of them are dead in the real world, so Don finds a loop hole that technically "kills" them in Nod, but sends their souls back to Earth, where they can reincarnate and find each other. The second to last page shows that though they haven't met up in the real world, in their new lives, yet, they can still see each other in Nod until they do.

Web Original

• The Twine story "All That We Could Ever Be" depicts a couple reuniting for the final time after an extended reincarnation romance. Describing itself as an 'anti-romance', it quickly turns into a deconstruction depicting the loss of identity and individuality shared by the two.
  One day, I'd like it if you could look at me with pride. Like I had accomplished something(something more than finding you again). But I spend too much time chasing you to be anything more.
• The Descendants has a pair of villains who were originally "bound by chains of Fate and pinned to the wheel of resurrection", allowing them to have this. But in the present, the spell has degraded so badly that they absolutely hate each other and yet are still drawn to each other in every lifetime and usually end up killing each other.
• Semi-subverted in Whateley Universe: Due to The Kodiak's Dying Curse following the destruction of Atlantis and the death of Queen Anghadhail, both he and his mate Grizzly^note whom he had forced to flee off-world, but then crash-landed on the ruined, magic-less Earth when she returned trying to find him were trapped by that curse, reincarnating as humans century after centur. While they were not always aware of the Red String of Fate which bound them, in most of their lives they would end up reunited, often as spouses (though which was husband and which wife varied). These relationships were rarely harmonious, but they did occur whenever they both were reborn close enough to each other for them to reunite.

Web Videos

• A cross-series example occurs between 3rd Life SMP and Empires SMP Season 1. Scott and Jimmy's characters fall for each other and have a Common Law Marriage in 3rd Life, become Together in Death after both of them are Killed Off for Real by nature of the Deadly Game premise of the series, reincarnate in the Empires world at some point, and fall for each other again.^note Granted, 3rd Life being a past life of Empires Season 1 started out as Ascended Fanon, but it's clearly a good enough idea for Scott the content creator to canonize it.
• Last Life has this as its central premise, featuring an enduring romance between two dark witches — one who has no memory of her past lives, and the other who finds out that her current life might be her last (hence the title).

Western Animation

• Played with in the American Dad! episode "A Star is Reborn". June Rosewood, an old silent film actress believes that Stan Smith is the reincarnation of her late husband, a silent film star...and Francine is the reincarnation of the ingenue he left her for...which is why she made them ghosts in the first place. As she tries to drown Stan and Francine, June's shocked when Francine suddenly declares she remembers being Gloria Delmar and that Stan was indeed Leonard Zane. At the very end, Stan thinks Francine was bluffing to throw June off so they could escape... only for her to admit she wasn't lying.
• DC Super Hero Girls also features the Hawkman/Hawkgirl romance. Carter Hall remembers his past relationships and knows that they're destined to be reincarnated, fall in love, and die tragically. When he sees Hawkgirl's current reincarnation Shiera Sanders, Karen (Bumblebee) gets so caught up in the love story, she goes overboard trying to help them get together. When he learns that the villain Hath-Set is destined to track them down and kill them once they meet, he decides to Screw Destiny and deliberately avoid Shiera so that she can live a long and happy life, even if he can't be part of it.
• Played with on Family Guy. In the episode, "Peter's Progress," Peter Griffin's past life Griffin Peterson's true love is a woman who resembles Lois, though she's never explicitly identified as being Lois' past life.
  • Over the years, there have been other "past" versions of Lois and Peter seen, but they are usually treated as identical ancestors rather than past lives. The fact that Peter is only a Griffin by marriage^note  As Francis Griffin was later retconned into being his stepfather. complicates this, especially since some of these would technically be more related to Lois, such as Nate Griffin and Lois' ancestor.
• Played with in Green Lantern: The Animated Series. Aya's human form is based on Illana, Razer's dead wife. She later becomes his Second Love.
• Justice League Unlimited runs with the Hawks being reincarnated, with the added twist that so is Green Lantern, and it's suggested he's who Shayera is meant to end up with (though not before she falls in love with a male Hawk).
• Unicorn: Warriors Eternal: In multiple lifetimes, Eldred and Melinda have been in love. In this current incarnation, Emma/Melinda struggles with accepting this idea while the current incarnation of Eldred embraces it immediately upon his awakening.

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