Looking for Love In All the Wrong Places

""Looking for love, in all the wrong places / Looking for love, in too many faces...""

- Johnny Lee, "Looking For Love"

The character indulges in an endless series of one-night stands and impulsive sexual encounters. Consciously or unconsciously they use such promiscuous behavior as a substitute for a lack of parental love and affection (either actual or perceived).

Looking for Love In All The Wrong Places differs from Casanova in that the Casanova is a predator indulging his desires and sating himself with his conquests, while Looking For Love is desperately searching for someone who respects and cares for them. This does not mean that Looking For Love is necessarily clingy or "wimpy"; they can appear to be as manipulative and self-centered as Casanova, and the two are sometimes confused for each other.

A variation on this trope is the unlucky variation of Single Woman Seeks Good Man; the character (nearly always a woman) who is permanently on the lookout for Mr. (or, more rarely, Ms.) Right. Whilst she might settle for Mr. Right Now if things are particularly bleak on that front, she'll go into every relationship convinced that "this is The One!" -- however, unfortunately for her every relationship she engages in will result in hilarity ensuing as every single man she dates either turns out to be a Romantic False Lead, has some small imperfection or otherwise turns out to be a complete jerk, thus leaving her right back where she started. It's often a complete waste of time anyway, since a bit of close self-examination would probably reveal -- much to her shock -- that she's in love with The Hero anyway.

See also Casanova Wannabe -- the two character types complement each other and often overlap. Compare Ladykiller in Love.

Anime and Manga

 * Neon Genesis Evangelion: Misato.
 * Nana "Hachiko" Komatsu from Nana epitomizes this trope: she has the worst possible taste in men, falls in love at the drop of a hat, and throws away the one good relationship she gets into (with Nobu) to stay with Smug Snake Takumi,
 * Genius Bruiser Hanamichi Sakuragi from Slam Dunk has fallen for 50 girls in his three years of junior high, and all of them have rejected him. Similarly, his friend and the team's Fragile Speedster Ryouta Miyagi has been hopelessly in love with his best friend, the Tsundere Ayako, but she's not receptive to his open affections. Curiously, the time they met Miyagi attempted to beat the shit out of Sakuragi after mistaking him for Ayako's date.
 * David Kruegel (a.k.a. Tekkaman Sommer) of Tekkaman Blade II is hopelessly in love with his boss, Aki Kisaragi, who has been devoted to Tekkaman Blade since day one of the original series. He disguises/denies this by surrounding himself with the Space Knights' Wrench Wenches and Bridge Bunnies, then taking all his evenings to the nearby bar and having frequent one night stands. Then he meets Dead. And then... unexpected stuffs happen.
 * Let's be fair to David. Dead End is... really, really feminine.

Literature

 * Diana Gabaldon's Outlander: Lord John. The author just won't leave this man alone.
 * Lord John gets his own series, and still he doesn't find a lasting relationship.
 * Johnny Truant in House of Leaves. He idolizes one woman--a stripper, to boot--but never works up the nerve to talk to her.
 * Howl of Diana Wynne Jones' Howl's Moving Castle, who thinks he's in love but loses interest as soon as the girl begins to reciprocate. It's implied that he cannot genuinely love anyone due to  Despite this, he remains a sympathetic character.
 * Jimmy of Oryx and Crake clearly thinks of himself as this. As we find out in the companion novel The Year Of The Flood, his lovers see him as more the Casanova.

Live-Action TV

 * Arguably Angela Montenegro from Bones, at least according to Sweets' interpretation.
 * Martin Tupper of Dream On, who went through woman after woman in a effort to replace his true love, his ex-wife, Lilith. (It should be noted that many fans of the show found Martin and Lilith's final season reconciliation to be the show's Shark Jump moment.
 * Jay from Hermans Head eventually admits that his Casanova Wannabe behavior is really motivated by a need to find someone who loves him.
 * Ted from How I Met Your Mother. Especially for the viewer, who already knows where he'll find his true love.
 * Also Barney.
 * Used in an episode of Law and Order SVU with a woman who quite literally had a sex addiction. However, this was not due to lack of affection but due to indirect sexual abuse by her father. It is presented as tragic rather than sexy or humorous.
 * With The L Word's Shane, it seems to be a toss-up between this and a benign lesbian Casanova, considering her 1000+ sexual conquests, propensity for one night stands, almost supernatural talent at seduction (e.g. while working at a wedding, managing to have sex with the mother and both sisters of the bride), compulsive cheating, and trail of broken hearts. The thing is, though, she's portrayed as an extremely caring person who gets laid so easily in part because of her empathy, and has genuinely fallen in love a few times, only to inevitably sabotage those relationships with her impulsiveness and pathological commitment issues. Her long-lost deadbeat dad gives her behavior a Freudian Excuse as well as a hint of In the Blood when she finally meets him and learns that he's a huge womanizer too.
 * Charlotte in Sex and The City, as the picture above shows, is all about this. While not really slutty (compared to the other three girls in the show anyway...), she has a string of bad boyfriends (and one husband), all because she's obsessed with settling down with a rich, handsome, tall man. She also has a weak spot for artists (she's an art dealer).
 * Star Trek Voyager: Harry Kim has so far fallen for a Borg, a dead crewmember, a hologram, and was once the crewmate of a race saboteur.
 * The Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode "Looking for Par'Mach in All The Wrong Places" references this. Ironically, this is the episode in which Official Couple Dax and Worf get together.
 * And that one had a very strange Love Dodecahedron in it, with Worf lusting after the Klingon chick but eventually helping Quark woo her and Dax helping Worf help Quark and calling him out on not looking for someone more attainable (her).
 * Not to mention Kira and O'Brian feeling intimate whilst he was caring for her (Don't ask).
 * The early seasons of The West Wing portray Donna as something like this.
 * Deb in Dexter has this syndrome, seasoned lightly with Fatal Attractor and the Cartwright Curse.

Music
"I was lookin' for love
 * The trope comes from the classic early 80's country hit "Lookin' for Love" by Johnny Lee.

In all the wrong places

Lookin' for love in too many faces

Searchin' their eyes, lookin' for traces

Of what I'm dreamin' of

Hopin' to find a friend and a lover

I'll bless the day I discover

Another heart lookin' for love"

"How could you give your love to someone else
 * The Survivor song "The Search Is Over" is about this trope. At the end, the guy realizes that the perfect girl for him has been there all along
 * "Save the Best for Last", performed by Vanessa Williams, tells a similar story from the viewpoint of the one who's always been there for the searcher.

And share your dreams with me?

Sometimes the very thing we're looking for

Is the one thing we can't see."

"She finds love in all the wrong places
 * P.O.D.'s "Youth of the Nation" mentions a twelve-year-old girl named Suzie who falls into the wrong crowd:

The same situations, just different places"

Videogames

 * The second installment in the Leisure Suit Larry series is subtitled "Looking for Love in Several Wrong Places" and involves Larry searching for a fulfilling relationship. This also applies to the first game: At the start he's just looking to lose his virginity, but later on he starts looking for actual commitment and, in his desperate search, even gets married. Though, of course, he only stays married for about ten minutes.
 * Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer: Gannayev is revealed to be pretty much this, once you get to know him. To start with, he's a hagspawn (even if an abnormally handsome one at that), a race that basically consists of the offspring of evil hags seducing human men and later eating them, so no good rep there. He also grew up with the impression that his hag mother deliberately abandoned him in the wilds as a baby. Facing hatred and prejudice from human communities, Gann has a go strolling through the land seducing young farmgirl virgins (sometimes in their dreams, no less). It takes meeting the player character, who acts in an understanding way, and meeting his mother and learning that she had in fact loved both him and his father and had been forced to abandon him to make Gann finally open himself to genuine love.
 * Zelos Wilder of Tales of Symphonia does this, although it's also part of a general Obfuscating Stupidity persona.
 * This happens to Muffy in the Wonderful Life Harvest Moon games. All of her boyfriends break her heart. For example, one of them was married and cheating on his wife with her (Muffy didn't know). She's always saying how men won't date her because she is "too old".
 * Betty Meyer in Last Window can be a bit of a flirt and asserts she can wrap men around her finger. She eventually, leading Kyle to confront her and her to eventually admit

Webcomics

 * Tybalt of Boy Meets Boy has elements of this: He sleeps around even though he's waiting for The One, but as he explains, it's so he won't get lonely while he waits.
 * In Homestuck, Marquise Spinneret Mindfang would often take hostages from the ships she plundered. At night, she would solicit the hostages when it was too dark to tell their blood color, hoping to find a matesprit among them.
 * She eventually resorted to looking into the future to find her destined matesprit. She soon regretted it (and stopped looking into the future) since

Web Originals

 * Survival of the Fittest: Rosa Fiametta. She managed to wise up a bit, but that just made future searches for Mr/Miss Right even worse.