Love Hurts / Live-Action TV

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• Falling in love with the bad guy/girl is always a bad idea. Just ask Ace Lightning, who had to go and fall in love with the bad guy?s main hench-lady, who ended up sacrificing herself for him at the end of the series.
• Marcus over Ivanova in Babylon 5, going so far as to sacrifice himself to save her life, transferring his life energy to her as she lay fatally injured. She is devastated that he would do such a thing, regretting she never returned his affection.
• The new Battlestar Galactica series loves this:
  • Lee/Kara: They meet and fall in Love at First Sight — and nearly hook up — when she's already dating his baby brother, whose death she accidentally has a hand in. They become good friends and later survive the end of their homeworlds together, but the memory of the dead baby brother, and their guilt, keeps them apart and in Just Friends mode until they get together with other people, rather than face their feelings for each other. When Lee finally admits his love to Kara and gets her to do the same, she freaks out and marries someone else the next day, breaking his heart and leading to his own marriage to a woman he doesn't really love. After Kara survives a Cylon prison and some serious mind games, they later reconcile and have an affair, but Kara won't get a divorce because of her religious beliefs, and when she finally unbends and considers the possibility, Lee is reluctant to leave his wife. And then Kara goes unhinged and dies, then returns and leads the Fleet to Earth. And just when it looks like it's all ok since they've found Earth, Lee doesn't care that Kara was really Dead All Along, and it looks like they'll finally get to be together, she tells him the fact that she was Dead All Along means she now has to disappear. As in, into thin air. Suffice it to say, Ron Moore is one of the few people who knows how to inflict more pain on a couple than Joss Whedon.
  • Adama/Roslin: They start out strongly disliking each other, move into a tenuous kind of peace with attraction, which gets shattered by the mutiny. Just as they fix that and get back to the tenuous attraction, she almost dies. Then, just as they fix that, SURPRISE CYLONS. Then once they kick the Cylons out, Adama gets hit with an attack of conscience, and then she's dying again, and then Earth, and then she dies.
  • Chief/Boomer.
• Oh, Call the Midwife! Dr Turner and Sister Bernadette spend an entire series in agony over their feelings for each other. On her part, she's a nun, and torn between her vows to God and the man she loves. On his part, he openly admits he would rather die than come between her and her God. As if that's not bad enough, oh guess what, she comes down with tuberculosis! Finally, in the last episode of the second series, they earn their happy ending when Bernadette, cured of her TB, decides that God is calling her to a different path. He asks her to marry him in very short order, and she says yes — but it is still bittersweet, as it means Bernadette has to leave the Order, which is all the family she has — most notably her beloved Parental Substitute Sister Julienne.
  • This applies to Sister Julienne as well in this storyline. When she finally no longer has to watch Bernadette going through her own personal hell, it's because she has to watch the young woman who is essentially her daughter leave the Order behind to marry the man she loves. The pain of letting her baby girl go is written all over Sister Julienne's face, giving a whole new meaning to the word bittersweet.
• Doctor Who. All of the Doctor's companions "break his hearts".
  • And he broke Martha's. (And Jack's. And Sarah-Jane's...) That was exactly why she decided to stop traveling with him.
  • The Doctor and Rose are depicted as Starcrossed Lovers. Ultimately they are separated permanently, although at least they got to share a short goodbye quite a while after the fact. Subsequently a human version of the Doctor is created. Ten takes his human self to Rose's parallel universe to spend the rest of his human life with her. While for Rose this is a somewhat happy ending, the real Doctor looks heartbroken and lonely as he watches the two kiss each other, knowing she will be happy but he will go on alone without her. Rose gets to be with Ten, technically, but he will never get to be with her.
  • And later, the Doctor and River Song, on both sides. The day he meets her is the day she dies. And while he sees her again (their timelines running roughly in opposite directions), falls for her and marries her, it's all knowing how and when he's going to lose her. And from her perspective, she starts with a man who loves her enough to sacrifice his life for her, but with each consecutive meeting he knows — trusts, loves — her less and less, until their final meeting (or so they think) when he has no idea of who she is. However, later on a poignant wrench is thrown into all of this. Her second-to-last encounter with him/his last encounter with her, at least in the physical world, wound up lasting twenty-four years. At that point he was a man who had seen all sides of her, who desired and loved her deeply for all her flaws. Emerging from this, the Doctor is nursing two broken hearts, but he is a stronger man for having known her nonetheless.
  • The Doctor and Clara Oswald's relationship is this trope writ large over nearly three seasons' worth of stories. Just as they're truly growing close, he regenerates into an older-looking man and draws back from her emotionally, while she finds an alternative in a gentle teacher at her workplace. A Love Triangle ensues that has her hurting both men with deception and waffling. She comes to understand she must commit to one of them. She chooses the teacher. He effectively dies three times over and she has a mental breakdown at the top of a draining Season Finale which ends with she and the Doctor parting over mutual lies because I Want My Beloved to Be Happy. Then they're brought back together and dearly happy again...but she's mortal, and he is quasi-immortal, and he becomes increasingly desperate to protect her at all costs. And then...she is killed off for real. Thanks to a really, really unfortunate spell of total isolation and torture after that, he becomes a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds in order to bring her back from the grave. In the end the lovers are parted forever, and he doesn't even have his key emotional/physical memories of her anymore, meaning that he doesn't understand how things came so far. On the other hand, this winds up having a positive effect on his relationship with River Song (see above).
• John/Aeryn in Farscape. They make out. They fight alongside each other. They're tortured. They try to kill each other. They have sex. They die. (They get better.) They murder people to get back to each other. They fight. They make out. They blow up a bunch of bad guys. They have a kid.
  • D'Argo and Chiana are just as much fun!
• Forever:
  • Henry avoids meaningful romantic relationships because in the past they've all ended in tragedy or betrayal, and he's still mourning the loss of Abigail, his wife of forty years, complicated by the lack of closure from her disappearance. He develops real feelings for Molly Dawes, then is reminded of the pain that comes with them when she's near-fatally injured. He breaks it off with her to avoid further, future heartbreak.
  • Defied in flashbacks with Abigail, especially in "Look Before You Leap," where Henry tries to leave Abigail but she chases him down and tells him, "Who cares how it ends? Life is about the journey, no matter how long it lasts!"
  • Also notably defied in "The King of Columbus Circle", in this case in regards to Abigail's desire to try to have a baby together. Henry decides that instead of worrying about "myself and some future heartbreak," he should concentrate on the fact that he has Abigail in the here and now.
• Friends: Ross and Rachel continually break each other's hearts with their Can't Live with Them, Can't Live Without Them relationship, Phoebe and David were separated by his job, Monica and Richard split up over wanting children and Chandler was devastated after Janice and later Kathy cheated on him and left. Averted with Monica and Chandler who were extremely happy after falling in love and had a healthy, fulfilling relationship. Also Phoebe and Mike eventually.
• Like the book its based on, love in Game of Thrones usually spells tragedy.
  • Ned Stark dies far away from his wife Catelyn, and she is left grieving.
  • Daenerys Targaryen loses her husband Drogo, despite her best efforts to save him. Her knight Ser Jorah Mormont is also in love with her, but she doesn't reciprocate his feelings for her.
  • Despite the homophobia of Westerosi society, Lord Renly Baratheon and Ser Loras Tyrell are in a loving, long-term relationship. Loras is heartbroken after Renly is murdered and is consumed by a thirst for vengeance against the kinslaying Stannis Baratheon. Losing the love of his life is already incredibly painful enough as it is, but what makes Loras' suffering even worse is that he cannot openly express his grief, as Renly was a man and a traitor to the crown. Also, since Joffrey has expressed a desire to execute all homosexuals, Loras can't afford to reveal any of his true feelings for Renly.
  • King Robb Stark and Talisa Maegyr have probably the happiest relationship on the show, but the political problems surrounding their marriage eventually lead to the Red Wedding, where the Freys deliberately murder Talisa (who was pregnant) in front of a devastated Robb, who has just enough time to crawl over to her corpse before being murdered as well.
  • Jon Snow and the Wildling Ygritte are also quite happy together, but the fact that Jon is a Fake Defector in the Wildling ranks, and they both know it, grates on their relationship, until Jon is forced to show his true loyalty to the Night's Watch when he refuses to kill an old man after being ordered to do so to prove he is no longer loyal to the Watch but Jon can't bring himself to murder an innocent in cold blood. A battle between Jon and the Wildlings ensues, he gets Ygritte out of the way so the Wildlings don't turn on her and when the battle is done, he escapes back to the Watch, leaving Ygritte, despite her being willing to run with him. She then shoots him three times with a bow to try and stop him. They meet again during the Wilding siege on Castle Black, but Ygritte is shot by Olly and dies in Jon's arms, devastating Jon.
  • Tyrion Lannister and Shae both love each other but Tyrion can never let his father Tywin Lannister know their relationship since Tywin would kill her, and he's too scared of his father to run away with her at her suggestion. His marriage to Sansa does not help matters. It gets worse later on when Tyrion tried to send Shae away, except it made her furious and she bites back implicating Tyrion in Joffrey Baratheon's murder by lying to the court during Tyrion's trial that she overheard him and Sansa plotting to kill Joffrey and twisted one of the sweetest moment between her and Tyrion ("my lion") into a sickening abusive moment, causing Tyrion to snap and declare a Trial by Combat. When Tyrion escapes from his cell, he goes to his father's room and finds Shae naked on his bed, causing him to strangle her while apologizing to her with tears.
  • Oberyn Martel and Ellaria Sand are clearly in love only to end with Oberyn's brutal death in the hands of Ser Gregor Clegane during Tyrion's Trial by Combat which she just watched. Unlike in the books where she tried to move on and doesn't want to be part of the revenge plot against the Lannisters because the people responsible of Oberyn's and Elia's deaths are already gone, she's the one instigating the revenge plot by trying to kill Myrcella Baratheon because of her Lannister blood and she succeeded by poisoning her which would likely worsen the feud between the Martells and the Lannisters. What's worse is that her revenge for Oberyn cost her the deaths of their daughters and the near destruction of the Martells.
  • Although Renly did not return Brienne of Tarth's feelings, she is still mourning for him in Season 4.
  • Brienne and Jaime have a deep respect and maybe a little yearning for each other, but are technically on different sides of the war, and there is the matter of Jaime's relationship Cersei, who is herself very dangerous. In the end, despite having fallen in love and even sleeping together, Jaime loves Cersei more, and leaves Brienne to be with her. This act culminates in his death.
  • Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen becomes each other's Second Loves, but, just like with their respective First Loves, it seems everything is conspiring against them. First, Jon's own family heavily disapproves of Daenerys, then it turns out they're aunt and nephew, which hamstrings the intimacy in their relationship due to the North's taboo against incest, and then people learn that Jon is the true heir to the Iron Throne and start scheming to place him on it. All of that, combined with the losses of Jorah Mormont, Rhaegal, and Missandei in quick succession slowly drives Daenerys insane, culminating in her burning King's Landing down with Drogon and plotting to Take Over the World. A desperate Jon begs Daenerys to stop, and when she refuses, even asking him to help her, he's forced to stab her after one last kiss in order to save not just his family, but the world, from her would-be tyranny. Their last moment together sees Jon crying as she dies in his arms.
• This could be the theme for Gossip Girl. If he's a nice guy, he'll sleep with someone else. If he's a redeemed jerk, turns out he's just a jerk. If he's your true love, he'll whore you out. If he seems perfect, he's sleeping with his stepmother or conning you out of your money or about to blackmail you into being his mistress. Love is pain, rich kids.
• Highlander: According to Word of God, Duncan MacLeod has had "four great loves" in his life. All four are dead, and not of natural causes. In one flashback, a gypsy he had promised to marry reads his palm and becomes very upset, shouting that he'd lied about marrying her, because according to his palm, he will "bury many women but marry none!" He proposes to Tessa in defiance of this prediction, and she's almost immediately kidnapped, almost killed, then rescued — and shot by a random mugger on the way to the car right after she's rescued.
• In House, House's hopeless love for his ex Stacy causes the pain in his leg to increase. When Wilson points out that this is the reason House is having more pain, House wacks him with his cane and replies: "Awww, you miss Stacy too?" when Wilson keels over.
  • There is also a Season 1 episode titled "Love Hurts," in which Cameron blackmails House into going on a date with her and House responds by shooting her feelings for him down. Hard.
• How I Met Your Mother isn't immune to this where the five main characters experience heart break at some point in the show:
  • Ted loves Robin but certain issues show that they're probably not meant to be together and he tries it again for the second time only to be rejected. He also gets dumped at the altar by Stella and breaks up with Zoey when she tries to sabotage his career. In the series finale, the titular Mother dies of the Soap Opera Disease.
  • Marshall and Lily are still going strong with their relationship and later, marriage. But they still experiences some problems like when Marshall is very depressed after Lily leaves him to go to San Francisco due to cold feet, though they manage to work it out for a while. This issue is revisited again in the last season.
  • The reason why Barney's such a suit-wearing womanizer is that his girlfriend cheated on him with a suit-wearing womanizer.
• Kamen Rider, at least in the new generation, is as fond of this trope as it's fond of Anyone Can Die. On the rare occasions where a love interest to a major character is still alive by season's end, the relationship between them will likely have ended instead.
• Loki (2021): Loki, upon falling in love with a female variant of "a Loki", genuinely opens up and places someone else's needs above his own for the first time in his life. So of course things fall apart between them at the end of the first season.
• Bo and Lauren Any one who watches Lost Girl will know this couple is a good definition of this trope. Bo and Lauren want each other from the first time they meet, but they can't even kiss because if they do Bo will lose control and drain Lauren of her life force, Bo gains control and gets together with Lauren... but only for one night because Bo learns that Lauren was with her to distract long enough to stop Bo from killing someone (even though they would have gotten together on their own as Lauren explains) and Bo refuses to talk to Lauren for the next few episodes unless it is work related. Then in the season finale just before Bo goes to fight her mother Lauren gives her a kiss which Bo responds to.
  • Season 2 Bo and Lauren get closer again eventually shacking up in the sixth episode only for Lauren to return to the Ashes compound and Bo finds out that Lauren has a girlfriend in a Coma, they move past this a few episodes later and kiss its all going well then Laurens girlfriend wakes up. This season is not even finished yet and there will be at least a third season.
• The titular character in Merlin (1998) (played by Sam Neill) goes through this several times in his relationship with Nimue. After he meets her for the first time, she is taken as a hostage by King Vortigern. When he gets around that, she is severely scarred by a dragon and withdraws to Avalon. When there is finally a good king on the throne and he thinks he can spend time with her, he learns of Mab's plot and has to rush back to Camelot to see Arthur. Then, years later, he thinks that they can finally, finally be together away from the rest of the world, but he leaves the place where they are staying, and it seals behind him, trapping her away forever. Unsurprisingly, the aged Merlin in the present says almost these exact words when telling his story. However, things turn out better at the very end. His BBC counterpart wasn't much luckier. The only girl he ever loved, Freya, ended up being a monster who was killed by Arthur and died in Merlin's arms. Thanks to Merlin's love for her, she was able to come back as a spirit of the lake but they rarely get to see each other.
• Art Kanji-Daemon is probably the Trope Codifier at how much love hurts him through all his life.
• Our Miss Brooks: Miss Brooks is deeply in love with largely Oblivious to Love Mr. Boynton. Because Failure Is the Only Option, Miss Brooks' schemes to get Mr. Boynton to marry her inevitable fail until The Movie Grand Finale when Mr. Boynton finally proposes and the two of them wed.
• Oz's Tobias Beecher loses his wife (she commits suicide), and later falls for Chris Keller, who it turns out was working for Schillinger, and they both subsequently break both his arms and legs. Busmalis even lampshades this after the incident. Though Keller arguably feels guilty afterwards, he spends the rest of the series trying to make it up to Beecher, both failing and succeeding at various points.
• Sadly, this was the course that Robin Hood decided to take. Only two couples get a happy ending: Will Scarlett/Djaq and John/Beatrice (who were only guest stars). All the other couples: Robin/Marian, Guy/Marian, Robin/Isabella, Robin/Kate, Much/Kate, Allan/Djaq, John/Alice, and any slash pairing you can think of, ended badly. VERY badly. Though Robin/Marian did get a Together in Death scene.
• Naomi from Skins lives in blind terror of this trope, constantly running away from her love of Emily until she can't handle it any more; and when they eventually get together, she's still so scared of getting her heart broken that she tries to break Emily's first. It all ends with a Happily Ever After, though, after an Anguished Declaration of Love in the finale in which Naomi admits — and seemingly gets over — all her fears. Then she gets cancer and dies.
• In Smallville, Chloe Sullivan puts it best, and mildly.
  Clark, things always get messy when you start throwing around the Clark-Lana triangle, and I'm speaking from experience when I say the third point always hurts.
• Every relationship in Supernatural. The Winchesters are crazy and clingy, Bobby had to kill his wife, Ellen lost her husband because John was an idiot, Sam's girlfriends tend to die horribly and Dean blurted out everything to his one-time girlfriend only to have her think that he was a lunatic and that she should break up with him.
• Love hurts quite a few people in Torchwood:
  • Ianto's attempt to save Lisa after she was partially roboticized causes nothing but grief.
  • Tosh is the show's poster child for Cartwright Curse.
  • In "Out of Time", Owen falls for an aviatrix from the 1950s. She feels the same way, but loves adventure more and risks another flight through the Rift. Owen has no idea where she ended up or if she survived.
  • "Children of Earth" — The only conceivable reason Ianto would've been in that room with the 4-5-6 is his absolute faith in and love for Jack, and then everyone Jack loves causes him terrible terrible pain in the end.
• The Vampire Diaries: Primarily Stefan and Elena, but any couple who has been together fits.
  • Damon and Elena could fit too, although not as much as Stefan and Elena.
• Joss Whedon must HATE happiness. Pick anything written by Whedon. The only exception is Simon and Kaylee, and that's just because they didn't get together until the end of the movie.
  • Buffy sleeps with Angel? He loses his soul and starts killing her friends, and then she has to send him to literal hell.
  • Willow and Oz are actually happy together? Oh no! We better make Oz go away to try and get rid of his wolf problem.
  • Giles has a nice grown-up relationship that's started to go somewhere? Guess who Angelus's next victim is?
  • Xander and Anya about to tie the knot? Xander gets a false vision of the future that destroys their relationship and sets Anya on the road to becoming a vengeance demon again.
  • Willow and Tara get back together? Oops, stray bullet on a physically impossible trajectory. Sorry, Tara.
  • Xander and Anya rekindle their love in the final season? Anya dies in the last episode.
  • Spike and Buffy patch things up in the last few episodes of Season 7? Time for some vampire flambé, everyone!
  • Then there's Joyce. In five years she dates a Stepford Smiler psycho robot and becomes a hormonal sullen teen along with Giles, to their mutual embarrassment — then she starts dating and enjoying it and BOOM, anyeurism.
  • In Season 5, Spike is tormented by his unrequited feelings for the Slayer.
  Spike: "What the bleeding hell is WRONG with you bloody women?! What the hell does it take?! Why do you bitches torture me?!"
  Buffy: "Which question do you want me to answer first?"
  • Hooray! Angel and Cordy are going to have DINNER! Oh, ok Angel, we need to have your son lock you up underwater for the summer, and yeah, Cordelia, you're going up to watch over them for a while, and come back different.
  • Wesley and Fred couple up? "Hey, Fred, you want to die and come back as an ancient pure demon living in your body?" "Sure." "Sorry, Wes..."
  • Zoe and Wash, the only happy marriage in the Firefly 'verse? Wash ends up dying in the Serenity movie impaled on a harpoon lauched by a reaver ship.
  • Dollhouse. Topher and Bennett. So freaking adorab BOOM, HEADSHOT!
    • The worst part is that every single time it happens, he makes you forget that he has that habit and then it hits out of nowhere. Fresh wounds every time.
  • Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is yet another example, this time with FitzSimmons and everyone Daisy is in a relationship with.
• White Collar: Neal goes through a lot because of his love for Kate — to start with, the four years he spent in prison were because he was desperate to find her and tell her that he loved her.

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