Absence Makes The Heart Go Yonder - Television Tropes & Idioms

In the animated movie The Super Dimension Fortress Macross:Do You Remember Love?, protagonist Hikaru Ichijyo, after being separated from his beautiful pop idol girlfriend Lynn Minmay, quickly forms a romantic relationship with his female superior officer Misa Hayase. Minmay's feelings for him, on the other hand, never diminished during his absence.
Something similar (although in this case it's coma related) is what kicks off the plot of Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien.

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In DC Comics, Stephanie 'Spoiler' Brown has just discovered an unpleasant consequence of faking your death for a year — her boyfriend, Robin, has since started dating again. (Actually, she was gone long enough that Robin's relationship with Wonder Girl had both come and gone, but at the time of her return Tim was dating Zoanne, a normal girl at his high school.)
- In Stephanie's defense she took it quite well, acknowledging that it was her fault in the first place. She and Tim managed to remain friends and crimefighting partners as he stayed with Zoanne. Of course, then ⁺
  ^{a new creative team came onboard, Steph was ordered by Batman to betray Tim to a villain to help 'make him a better Robin', in the process entirely ruining her friendship with him. Very shortly after Tim then finally hit the end of the Trauma Conga Line that his life had turned into ever since Identity Crisis and Steph's faked death, had what can only be described as a complete nervous breakdown, and in the process of cutting himself off from any and all beneficial human contact Tim broke up disastrously with Zoanne.}
  And so the whole point was rendered spectacularly moot.
Bucky in Ultimate Marvel plays it more seriously—he married Captain America's girl while Cap was frozen in ice.

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This happens to Tom Hanks's character in Cast Away. In a subversion, she's instantly ready to completely abandon her family and run away with him, but he rebukes her.
- She didn't wait long either, he had been gone for about five years and when he returns she has a kid who looks to be two or three.
- This, in turn, was referenced in Family Guy, after Peter was stranded with Quagmire, Cleveland and Joe on a desert island, only to finally return home and find that Brian had taken over his former role in the home. (They explicitly only married for stability, and, to Brian's chagrin, never did the deed. This is to keep their UST, well, U.)
In The Princess Bride, Buttercup doesn't wait for Westley (although she doesn't so much move on as give up on love and consent to a loveless engagement). He was presumed dead, but he seems to think she should have waited for him anyway.
- Pointed out in this xkcd strip.
Calypso didn't wait for Davy Jones in Pirates Of The Caribbean... but Elizabeth did wait for Will.
In the Spawn movie, the title character comes Back From The Dead Like A Badass Out Of Hell, and finds out that his girl married his old partner. He's somewhat pertubed by this. The partner, meanwhile, is scared shitless... but really, wouldn't YOU be? Ex-boyfriends are bad enough when they aren't undead antiheroes with demonic powers.
This is the root cause of the Love Triangle in Pearl Harbor.
- Though it is a bit Justified. The girl's first love was assumed dead after his plane was shot down. And before leaving for this mission, the guy told his best friend to watch over his girl if anything happened.
Referenced in the German Film Wo ist Fred (Where is Fred). Til Schweiger pretends to be dumb and wheelchair bound and meets a nice girl. After the climax of the film, when all is revealed, he wakes up in hospital where she says that he was in a coma for two years and that she has gotten married. After a moment she tells him that she is only joking but that he deserves the joke after his ridiculous wheelchair stunt.
This is one of the main plot drivers of Superman Returns: Superman went off for some years to find Krypton, but didn't bother telling anyone where he was going or when he would be back. His mother mostly accepts it but does scold him for leaving her unexpectedly, but Lois fits this trope perfectly: she married someone else, has a son, and won a Pulitzer Prize for a news article "Why the world doesn't need Superman". Of course, the son is Superman's, and from all indications both Lois and her husband knew it.
At the end of Batman Begins, Rachel Dawes promises Bruce that she will wait for the day he stops being Batman to be with him. Fast forward to The Dark Knight, and not only does she back out on this, but she's managed to meet and agree to marry Harvey Dent...within a span of about eight months.
- Perhaps it became obvious that he was never going to stop being Batman.
Double subverted in The Perez Family. Juan Raúl and Carmela, who have been separated for 20 years by the Cuban Revolution, spend most of the movie looking for each other to resume their marriage. During their search they both meet somebody else they start to fall for, but then they finally find each other. The next-to-last scene is played with some vague dialog that makes it sound like they are going to get back together, but it turns out that they have in fact agreed to end their marriage amicably and continue with their new partners.
My Favorite Wife was a 1940 comedy about a woman returning home after being shipwrecked (with a very handsome man) for seven years. See also another 1940 movie, Too Many Husbands.

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In The Count Of Monte Cristo, Edmond Dantes is gone for years, and Mercedes marries his enemy and raises a son during that time. Despite the fact that she was told he was dead and did not know that her husband was his enemy, this is supposedly a terrible thing for her to have done.
- One of the many "do not follow the plot too strictly" movies tried to "Justified" this by claiming Mercedes was pregnant with Dantes' child and had no choice but to marry to save her reputation. It's hard to say which is more of a Wall Banger.
- Lampshaded and parodied in the Simpsons episode parodying The Count Of Monte Cristo, where everyone including Marge as Mercedes turns on Homer as Dantes for his revenge plot.
The Great Gatsby has Jay Gatsby going off to war, and Daisy marrying Tom Buchanan before he returns and finds her.
The Discworld novel Eric has the Discworld version of Helen of Troy, who got tired of waiting for the war to end and settled down and had kids.
The book, movie and TV series The Dead Zone. She didn't wait while he was in a coma.
Peter Pan's mother gave up waiting for him to come home, and when he went back the window was closed and there was a different boy in his bed. Of course in Peter Pan's case, he could have returned at any time, so really he's the jerk for letting his mother think he was gone forever.
In Dave Duncan's A Handful of Men series, the wife of the Imperor (not a typo) thinks her husband has died while they were all on the run from the Bad Guys, and she ends up falling for (and marrying) another man. When he shows up again, things are a bit awkward.
Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series, in which someone is Mistaken For Dead - there is a war going on, after all - and his wife ends up getting pregnant by, and married to, another man. (And why is that not a trope name?) This is a particularly painful one because both the husband and the new guy are major characters, so we get to spend the entire time the husband is making his slow, tortuous journey back home knowing exactly what's waiting for him, and that things will get very bad when he finishes his quest. Turtledove eventually has him go nuts and get himself killed to resolve the Love Triangle.
- Further, the only reason the woman and "other man" hooked up is because they were in the middle of an attack and, in the heat of almost-died have sex. Eventually (in 2031, thanks to Human Popsicle), he admits some of this to his son, but is still too embarrassed to tell the whole story.
Older Than Dirt: Both Agamemnon and his wife Clytemnestra were unfaithful while he was off fighting in the Trojan War. When he returned, his wife and/or her lover murdered him.
- Although the fact that he sacrificed their daughter for the gods' favor may have had something to do with it. As well as bringing home his new squeeze, Cassandra.
This has to apply to the Outlander series somehow...Claire ends up with two husbands in two different time periods, gets pregnant by one husband and raises that baby with the other husband (though the marriage itself sounds like it wasn't terribly happy after her return). Definitely doesn't forget about #2 (who was presumed dead) when she went back to #1, but felt guilty for wanting to be with #2 when #1 still existed in his own timeline alive and well.
- It applies even better to Jamie's activities in the 20 years Claire spent in the 20th century. He has a couple flings, one resulting in a child, and even gets married to a widow who once tried to have Claire killed as a witch.
Happens to Marco's father in Animorphs. His wife (Marco's mother) disappeared two years before the beginning of the series, and everyone believed her to be dead. He got married again in book #35, and then, as soon as book #45, he found out that Marco's mother was alive. This was, as you would expect, stressful for him. But he didn't face any kind of Love Triangle, since his new wife, having been captured by the Yeerks, was not herself, and being with her wasn't an option.
Given an interesting twist in David Eddings' Belgariad. Garion grew up on a peaceful farm, with his somewhat dim-witted best friend, and the flirtatious girl next door... who became the object of both their affections when they grew a bit older, a fact that she enjoyed immensely. Then, Garion get swept up in this whole 'save the world from an evil god' quests, leaving the farm behind, and quickly maturing into a bona-fide, Magic Knight-style hero. Then, 'bout halfway through his quest, the party swings by the old farm, and he finds that his friend married the girl... said friend, however, is terribly impressed with Garion's new heroic profile, and appologizes for snatching up the girl in his absence... and the girl is both ready and eager to dump him to run off with the new and improved Garion, too. Unfortunately for her, Garion's found himself a fierce-tempered, red-headed Princess while out and about, and while he still cares for his old girlfriend, he carefully hides it to make sure she'll stick with the steady guy. Besides, he's got a destiny to catch up with...
- There's also that if Garion doesn't marry the princess, a centuries-old treaty will be voided and the resulting diplomatic disaster will irreparably sunder the armies of the West at just the exact time all goodly nations need to unify to avoid being crushed by said evil god. Add in that Garion is falling genuinely in love with Ce'Nedra and vice versa, and that Zubrette's life expectancy would be measured in days if she tried to share the rigors of the quest with Garion, and, well, who can blame him for not wanting to ruin her marriage and then end her life in the same month.
At the end of Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Chessmen of Mars, Djor Kantos reveals that, believing her dead, he had married another. She's delighted. By Cleaning Up Loose Romantic Ends that way, he had freed her from The Promise, and she can marry the hero.

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Mark didn't wait for Captain Janeway in Star Trek Voyager. Very subversive of the typical Double Standard applied to this trope. This scars Janeway pretty deeply, and the idea is revisited in a couple of episodes where Voyager's crew is under alien mind control. In the first, Janeway hallucinates about Mark appearing on Voyager with her; in the second, as part of an elaborate illusion, she receives "letters from Earth" in which Mark reveals he has broken off his engagement with the other woman.
Teal'c's wife in the Stargate SG-1 episode "Family".
Another example of a male not waiting. Stargate Atlantis episode "The Intruder." During flashbacks of the team's time on Earth after a year without contact, it's shown the Dr. Weir's boyfriend, first seen in the pilot watching a video explaining what she was doing, had met someone else during that time. Turned down a chance to get to Atlantis to stay with the new woman.
In the finale of Alias season 2, Sydney is kidnapped and brainwashed for two years. In her absence, Vaughn marries another woman. Fan outrage against C.O.W. (Contrived Odious Wife) was swift and severe. The resulting awkwardness was eventually resolved by said woman turning out to be The Mole and eventually being killed by Vaughn himself.
On Quantum Leap, Al's first wife, and true love, remarries while he's a POW in Vietnam. This leads him to have a string of failed marriages and realtionship. In the series finale, Sam goes back and tells her Al's still alive and coming home, thus changing history.
In an episode of NCIS, the team is helping a woman from a war-torn African nation look for her husband, a political activist who was forced to flee the country years ago and who has had no contact with her since. When they find him, it turns out that he has remarried and had a child, because his wife and most of his family had been reported dead.

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British folk song "The House Carpenter" (Child Ballad #243). It doesn't end well—she runs off with her old flame, but he turns out to be 1) dead, and 2) evil.
In the Who's rock opera album Tommy and in the subsequent movie, the titular character's father, Captain Walker, goes off to war and is later declared missing in action and presumed dead. Tommy's mother then remarries. This may have seemed like a decent idea until Captain Walker returns home, and going by the album version kills her new husband or in the film is killed by him.

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In Funky Winkerbean, during the second Time Skip, Wally is apparently killed and buried, and Becky remarries. Lately, Wally has returned. It seems the body was misidentified. Very awkward.

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Parodied in the webcomic xkcd, here.

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Mocked in The Pirates of Penzance with the line:
Oh, here is love, and here is truth,
And here is food for joyous laughter:
She will be faithful to her sooth
Till we are wed, and even after.
- Note that Mabel was pledging to wait over 60 years.
In Miss Saigon, after Chris was separated from Kim, he returned to America and married, after a suitable period of emotional catatonia. Kim, who had gotten pregnant, awaited the day that Chris would return to Saigon and take her and their son to America. Needless to say, when Chris found out that Kim was still alive, he had a bit of explaining to do to his wife, Ellen.
- Although you might question the suitable period of emotional catatonia... According to the timeline given by the characters, getting married was pretty much the first thing he did after coming back to America.

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A parody of The Shawshank Redemption was used on Drawn Together, though working at a lemonade stand was used instead of marriage...
A man frozen in ice in the South Park episode Prehistoric Ice Man returns to find his wife has remarried and had two children with her new husband, who are eight and thirteen. He's understandably confused since he was only gone for three years...
- Oddly enough Based On A True Story from Nederland, Colorado, not too far from the actual South Park the show takes place in. Well, barring the guy coming back to life, that is.
Done for laughs in the Futurama movie Bender's Big Score. Hermes's body was damaged and would take a week or two to repair while his head was kept alive in a jar. His wife Labarbara said that a week was too long, so she immediately hooked up with her ex-husband Barbados Slim. All this over Hermes's vocal protestations.
In Spawn: The Animated Series, the titular characters comes back from the dead to find his wife remarried to his best friend. In a subversion, it turns out that he has partial amnesia, and recovers the memory of specifically asking his friend to "take care of" his wife if anything were to happen to him. It's unclear whether he specified the sexual aspect....

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On a particular episode of Dr. Phil as I recall a soldier in Iraq was counted for dead, and then his wife went on to marry his best friend. Needless to say the fellow turned out to be alive and returned home to an unwelcome surprise. Cue the Dr. Phil theme.

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