"Oh, hey. You dropped something."
Lucy: Schroeder, do you think love is the answer to everything?
Love Hurts; it's messy and a mathematical nightmare where only a few can come out happy, never mind unscathed. One of its worst injuries is perhaps the plainest one… pining away at someone because All Love Is Unrequited, and in the end never even holding them because I Want My Beloved to Be Happy.
Then, there's times a deep-frozen love life is not because of Star-Crossed Lovers, the pursued Love Interest being the Master of the Mixed Message or any such thing. It's because the rules of plot and characterization dictate that they not notice the protagonist's overtures and Longing Looks. Bob likes Alice, and he makes several increasingly obvious hints that he's interested, he'd like to ask her out, and wants to be her boyfriend. Alice (though gender reversals are common) will usually be oblivious enough that his stuttering overtures aren't heard or followed up on, and on top is usually blind to Bob as a love interest because she:
- Sees him as a brother, or as a friend.
- Believes she is unworthy of love and assumes she's misunderstanding his intentions,
- Believes she's an Old Maid incapable of attracting love,
- Can not recognize love and mistakes it for something else, like a blush for a fever,
- Isn't convinced that he's her type,
- Doesn't pick up on the fact that he's interested in her,
- Is in deep denial
Examples
- Anime and Manga
- Comic Books
- Fan Works
- Literature
- Live-Action TV
- Video Games
- Visual Novels
- Web Comics
- Web Original
- Western Animation
- Real Life
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Films — Animated
- In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Esmeralda is oblivious to Quasimodo's love. Which, unfortunately for Quasi, means she hooks up with Phoebus instead. Right in front of him, in fact.
- The Nightmare Before Christmas: Jack Skellington, thy name is clueless.
- In Frozen, Anna doesn't realize that Kristoff had fallen in love with her until Olaf casually mentions it.
- Strange Magic: Princess Dawn completely fails to notice her best friend Sunny (who's an elf) is in love with her, despite his increasingly obvious hints. She's too busy flirting with every fairy boy that she fails to see his attempts to woo her. This drives Sunny to make a Love Potion to make her love him.
- In The Secret Life of Pets, Max is completely oblivious to Gidget's rather blatant crush on him. Until he develops one on her in turn after seeing her go One Dog Army on Snowball's minions at the climax.
Films — Live-Action
- Ted, the gym manager in Burn After Reading, is in love with Linda, who looks everywhere for a man and wants several rounds of cosmetic surgery to improve her odds. In the end, he does something heroically stupid to try and help her.
- This is of course the basic plot of any number of romantic comedies out there.
- Joe Dirt is pretty good at picking up trashy redneck women, but when it comes to sweet girls, he thinks they're just being nice.
- Sky High (2005): Will Stronghold is oblivious to Layla's crush on him, although he does have the excuse that Gwen Grayson got him to fall in love with her, then pretended not to notice herself in order to better string him along (even though when it came time the reveal that 'it was mutual', he couldn't take the hint until she flat-out said it).
- Mark from The Room, to a ridiculous extent. He never gets the idea that he's helping Lisa, who is Mark's best friend's Johnny's fiancé, cheat on Johnny until about the fourth or fifth time that Lisa calls him over to have sex.
- X-Men: First Class: Charles Xavier doesn't notice that Raven Darkholme harbours some non-sisterly feelings towards him.
- The Hunger Games: Katniss Everdeen cannot see that Gale and Peeta clearly love her until they outright state it to her. In Peeta's case, it takes some time for her to realize even after he blatantly says it.
- The Patsy: Poor Tony has no clue that Pat is besotted with him. When she tells him "I'm in love with a man who hardly knows I exist," he cluelessly offers her advice on how to attract the mystery man.
- A Running Gag in the original Ghostbusters (1984) was Janine's crush on Egon and how he was absolutely oblivious of it due to his cold scientific nature.
Music
- "Everybody Knows (Except You)" by The Divine Comedy
- "Shiver" - Coldplay ("it's you / I see / but you don't see me")
- "3 Libras" by A Perfect Circle implies this trope.
- "That Girl" by The Noisettes
That girl’s in love with you//I know that you’re too blind to see//I know that it’s so plain to see
- Taylor Swift:
- "You Belong With Me" is about a girl with an unrequited love towards a friend.
- "I'd Lie" by Taylor Swift
He looks around the roomInnocently overlooks the truthShouldn't a light go on?Doesn't he know that I've had him memorized for so long?- "Teardrops on My Guitar" has shades of this, too.
- Westlife's "Obvious"
- 98 Degrees' "Invisible Man," "You Should Be Mine," "You Don't Know," "Why Are We Still Friends?"
- Backstreet Boys' "All I Have to Give"
- *NSYNC's "Crazy For You"
- Clay Aiken's "Invisible" (if you ignore the Stalker with a Crush subtext...)
Newspaper Comics
- Peanuts: Charlie Brown and Marcie. He's understandably intimidated by Peppermint Patty's overtures, but has yet to notice Marcie. Charlie Brown does figure out that Marcie likes him, but not until she (very bluntly) tells him so. His self-esteem is so low, he can't really believe that any girl can be interested in him, even Peppermint Patty. There's also Charlie and the Little Red-Headed Girl, who probably doesn't even know he exists.
- Calvin and Susie Derkins from Calvin and Hobbes. Word of God says
that they have a mutual crush on each other. Calvin, apparently, either doesn't know about it or doesn't know how to deal with it, so he does his best to gross out and anger Susie, who then always gets mad at him.
- Arguably, this may apply with Susie as well. Susie generally is contemptuous of Calvin, ignores him, and associates with him only when she has to, but at the same time, perhaps like Calvin, doesn't know how to handle her feelings towards him.
- Strangely enough, in the strip it's Hobbes (Calvin's alter ego?) who is attracted to Susie and is always convincing Calvin to go play with her.
"...So what happened to the mandibles of death, you sissy furball?!?""I was beguiled by her feminine charms. Yow. Go soak your head."- Most likely Calvin just projects his feelings onto his imaginary friend as a way of dealing with them.
- Though Hobbes also sometimes teases Calvin by suggesting he and Susie like each other; assuming he is real, it's possible he's just acting infatuated to get under Calvin's skin.
- In Curtis, the titular character is too busy crushing on Michelle (who most definitely does not reciprocate) to realize that his good friend Chutney is head-over-heels in love with him. Once or twice he does wonder "Could it be that Michelle doesn't like me and that Chutney does?" but always writes the possibility off in the end.
Theatre
- Anne in A Little Night Music is not only oblivious to her awkward stepson's feelings for her, but also to her own feelings about him, which she only realizes at the end.
- In Les Misérables, depending on the actor, Marius can sometimes come off as quite a bit thick in the head about this with Eponine.
- In The Sound of Music, Maria has absolutely no clue the Captain is in love with her until the Baroness (for her own ends, of course) points it out. This is possibly because Maria has spent too much time in a convent. A moral crisis immediately ensues, which the Reverend Mother very nicely clears up.
- Cyrano de Bergerac:
- Cyrano uses Selective Obliviousness to refuse to comprehend that he can be loved even with his enormous nose. At Act I Scene V, Le Bret has to remind him of the Smitten Teenage Girl Cyrano meet some moments ago. At Act IV Scene IX, Christian stubbornly tries to convince him that Roxane loves his “soul” – Cyrano – instead of his face. Cyrano will not believe it. Justified because Cyrano has serious Mommy Issues and his upbringing makes him more comfortable being the Love Martyr.
Le Bret: Your courage and your wit! — The little maidWho offered you refreshment even now,Her eyes did not abhor you—you saw well!Cyrano (impressed): True!- Through Act II to Act V, Roxane uses Selective Obliviousness to refuse to comprehend that Cyrano, the Unlucky Childhood Friend who always does everything she asks him and whom has been at her side every Saturday without fault for the last fifteen years could want to be more than be Just Friends. Justified again because she is the Insane Avatar of a Romance Novel Heroine, who longs to be the Mad Bride of a guy who was fair and witty.
- In Seussical, Horton is unaware of Gertrude's crush on him, even when she sings a song about it straight at him (he's too busy talking to Whos). This arguably changes after she reveals her Determinator tendencies in "All For You".
- In Cromwell by Victor Hugo, Rochester is one of the men plotting against Cromwell and convinced he's in a forbidden romance with the man's daughter, sharing looks and that this affair will protect him. He's found guilty with the rest and to be executed, at which point the audience learns that Cromwell's daughter had no idea who the man even was and the "affair" existed only in his mind.
- In the Mrs Hawking play series: In part IV: Gilded Cages, Victoria does not realize that Reginald is falling in love with her. She explains it to her nephew many years later as her own aromantic nature made it hard for her as a young person to see the signs she herself was unfamiliar with.
Web Video
- Parodied in The Nostalgia Critic's fourth video about commercials, which has a Running Gag about a witch who wants to have a sexy time with someone. She attempts to tell her targets about it via all sorts of innuendos, and when that fails, she resorts to bluntly spelling it out to them. They remain utterly oblivious even then - The Stinger shows Mark, from The Room, being the final recipient of her advances, acting just as oblivious before until telling her that it's sexual harassment and he doesn't have to take it.
- Pokemon Pals: Ash has serious trouble catching on to Misty's advances. The fact that he doesn't know what sex is doesn't help.
