Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder

""Winnie left the next summer to study art history in Paris. Still, we never forgot our promise. We wrote to each other once a week for the next eight years. I was there to meet her when she came home... with my wife, and my first son -- eight months old. Like I said, things never turn out exactly the way you planned.""

- Kevin Arnold, The Wonder Years

When a couple is separated against their wishes, and their love is particularly strong, it is fully expected that they will try to find each other, and refrain from getting involved with anyone else. However, sometimes this is actually quite hard to accomplish, especially in the case of someone believing their lover will never come back, or that they are dead. But unexpectedly, their lover comes back to them, and they are happily reunited.

Or they would be, if it weren't for a little problem — they didn't wait. Not only did they not wait, but they've remarried. Not only did they not wait and remarry, but they've started a family!

If she wants to wait but is coerced into marrying, it's You Have Waited Long Enough — whereupon her true love will show up in time to save her from the wedding.

If she does wait, and a reunion reveals she is no longer in love, it's Old Flame Fizzle, which tends to be treated far more sympathetically.

The name of this trope is a subversion of the popular saying, "Absence makes the heart grow fonder." (Although the original version of the saying was "Absence makes the heart grow fonder unless it makes the heart go yonder.") The popular saying "Out of sight, out of mind" is more likely to be accurate, though.

Interestingly, research has shown that the odds of a relationship surviving a physical separation depends largely on two things: the commitment of the parties involved, and the duration of the separation compared to the duration of the relationship prior to the separation (and the ease of making the separation seem less: compare a long video chat with a terse E-mail). A new romance is likely to be nipped in the bud, but an older flame is likely to grow stronger if the two in question are determined to keep it alive.

Not to be confused with the Trope Namer, the King's Quest game of the same name.

Contrast Second Love, The Mourning After, You Have Waited Long Enough, I Will Wait for You.

Anime/Manga

 * In the animated movie 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.
 * In Shaman King, when both Jun and her spirit partner Bailong look at each other in the middle of a battle and faintly blush, Tamao is quick to point out that they make a good pair. To which hilariously, Anna then points out that Bailong did have a wife previously and declared he was cheating on her. Of course, Bailong is dead and then again, so is his wife.
 * What happened with  in Xxx Holic if the fact   is any indication. However,  . Also,
 * The xxxHolic: Rou OVA explains that . It's actually far more heartwarming than it sounds.

Comic Books

 * 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. 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, and she took it quite well, acknowledging that it was her fault for disappearing. She and Tim managed to remain friends and crimefighting partners as he stayed with Zoanne. Of course, then And so the whole point was rendered spectacularly moot.
 * Bucky in Ultimate Marvel plays it more seriously--he married Captain America's fiancee while Cap was frozen in ice.
 * A pretty big issue in Shade's and Kathy's relationship in Shade the Changing Man. While being separated from Shade, Kathy starts up a lesbian affair with their mutual friend Lenny. Shade himself feels guilty about falling out of love with girlfriend on his homeworld.
 * The Distant Finale of the first volume of Zero Girl. Ouch.
 * Sort of kind of done in Y the Last Man. The story in short: Yorick has a long distance phone call with his girlfriend, Beth, but it gets disconnected before Yorick, who had intended to propose over the phone, can say what he wanted to say. After this, complete Gendercide ensures, and Yorick is left the only living man on Earth! One year and a lot of adventurers later he finally meets up with his dear sweetheart, Beth... only to find out that she had intended to break up with him during that phone call one year ago, because her heart had gone yonder during his absence. Not only that, but she had realized that she was actually in love with Yorick's sister! C'mon, let's say it all together now: Alas Poor Yorick.

Film - Animated

 * This is what Marian fears in Robin Hood, that Robin had simply forgotten about her during their time apart. However, the very next scene subverts it, as Robin is clearly shown thinking about her.
 * According to Chuckles the Clown from Toy Story 3, this is actually the main reason why  was evil in the first place:

Film - Live Action
""I am your Prince and you will marry me," Humperdinck said.
 * This happens to Tom Hanks's character in Cast Away; he comes back after five years to find that his loved one started a family with someone else two or three years after he vanished. In a subversion, she's instantly ready to completely abandon her family and run away with him, but he rebukes her.
 * 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.)
 * Calypso didn't wait for Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean....
 * According to Word of God, this allows to be with  as much as he wants, as long as the job is still done. The "one day per ten years" rule does not apply to faithful couples, it seems.
 * 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 perturbed 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.
 * In the end,
 * 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.
 * In the book, it's more blatantly You Have Waited Long Enough.

Buttercup whispered, "I am your servant and I refuse."

"I am your Prince and you cannot refuse."

"I am your loyal servant and I just did."

"Refusal means death."

"Kill me then."

"I am your Prince and I'm not that bad - how could you rather be dead than married to me?"

"Because," Buttercup said, "marriage involves love, and that is not a pastime at which I excel. I tried once, and it went badly, and I am sworn never to love another."

"Love?" said Prince Humperdinck. "Who mentioned love?""


 * 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 his best friend unintentionally ended up falling in love with her.
 * 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,.
 * 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.
 * Except that was the entire point of the sequel.
 * Double subverted in The Perez Family. Juan Ra?nd 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; and the 1963 remake Move Over, Darling. See also another 1940 movie, Too Many Husbands
 * Jarhead. It's particularly unnerving to Not to mention the . This trope is a major theme and comes in endless waves.
 * In the 1990 Captain America film Steve Roger's fiance Bernice waited for him for 16 years when he went missing and presumed dead during his first mission as Captain America. She got married when she was 38 because Her Biological Clock Was Ticking. When they are reunited he is amazed that she waited that long.
 * In Swing Shift, Kay Walsh's husband enlists in the Navy after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and she eventually winds up more or less seduced by her factory boss. After a one-night stand they wind up properly dating, which gets broken up when Kay's husband comes home. Fun is not had by anyone, but it turns out all right in the end.
 * Variant in Casablanca - Ilsa hooked up with Rick, believing her husband Victor to be dead. Turns out he wasn't. Oops!
 * Slight variation in The Dead Zone in that Johnny wasn't presumed dead while his fiancee didn't wait for him, he was in a coma from which no one was sure he would wake.
 * In the 2010 adaptation of Riverworld, Matt finds that his beloved Jessie has shacked up with Richard Burton. What makes this really painful for Matt is that from his perspective, he and Jessie were only separated for a few days. From Jessie's perspective, she searched for Matt for four years, then fell for Richard after he saved her from some rapists.

Literature

 * 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.
 * Actually the problem Dantes had was just that she chose to marry his enemy, not that she chose to marry. He specifically said the eighteen months (unlike in the film adaptation, Albert wasn't Dantes's son in the novel) she waited before moving on was all a lover could ask for.
 * One of the many "do not follow the plot too strictly" movies tried to "justify" this by claiming Mercedes was pregnant with Dantes' child and had no choice but to marry to save her reputation.
 * 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 (Literature) 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 focus 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.
 * Worth pointing out, the husband was shown to be a good and loving man, but he got put through a Humiliation Conga par excellence in the meantime and thus is in no mood to be rational when he finds out. He ends up developing a persecution complex and deciding that the best way to punish everyone who he feels wronged him (including his wife) would be to betray humanity.
 * Further, the only reason the woman and "other man" hooked up is because they were in the middle of an air raid and have Glad to Be Alive Sex. Eventually he admits some of this to his son, but is still too embarrassed to tell the whole story and confesses that had she not gotten pregnant, the woman involved would most likely have gotten back with her husband.
 * Jens also does have a grievance against the US military, whose "national security" prevented him from letting his wife know he was alive. In fact, a single letter saying "I'm alive" would've prevented her from re-marrying, but somehow the army thought it would jeopardize the atomic bomb project. And then the army people wonder why they guy's pissed off at them.
 * Sam muses that, had it not been wartime, he'd be in a lot of legal trouble for polygamy (although, technically, it'd be his wife who would be in trouble). Fortunately for them, the US has other things to worry about.
 * In another Turtledove example, in the timeline-191 series, Jefferson Pinkard is drafted to go fight in WWI. When he finally gets leave, he finds his wife in bed with his old steel-mill buddy, who came home from the trenches short an arm. He forgives her, largely due to his own transgressions at whorehouses near the front. After the war, the sorry state of the Confederacy drives him to the Freedom Party. His absence leads his wife back to the steel-mill buddy. These betrayals are a big part of what turns him on to the path that ends in his
 * In the Outlander series, 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.
 * Also, Marco lied to his dad, saying that the new wife had always been a Yeerk, and had started dating him only as an opportunity to lead him to the Yeerks.
 * 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 apologizes 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 Romantic Loose Ends that way, he had freed her from The Promise, and she can marry the hero.
 * In one of the Brother Cadfael novels by Ellis Peters, it turns out that the murdered man's wife used to be Cadfael's fiancée -- long ago, before Cadfael left on a crusade. Most of the other characters seem to think that Cadfael still has a crush on her. He denies this vehemently, and says she did the right thing in not waiting for him to come back.
 * At the beginning of the novel American Gods, the main character, Shadow, is finally getting out of prison and can't wait to see his wife again. Unfortunately for him, not only did his wife just died in a car crash, but she unwittingly caused said car crash, by giving a blowjob to the driver, Shadow's best friend. Poor guy, especially considering that she was part of the reason he was in jail for the first time.
 * In Tranquilium, the female main character falls in love with the hero. The hero is then separated from her for a long time, eventually leading her to reunite with her husband, whom she never got around to divorcing (this turns out to have been the right choice, as they discover they still do love each other after all).
 * In Great Expectations, Pip ignores Biddy's obvious love for him as he fruitlessly pursues Estella. After he realizes the error of his life choices, he returns to claim Biddy as his bride, only to find out she has married Joe instead.
 * The introduction to the first legal edition of Lady Chatterleys Lover discusses definitions of obscenity and offers us this example: "I come home after three fucking years in fucking Africa [fighting in WW 2] and what do I fucking well find? My wife, engaged in illicit cohabitation with a male!"
 * In PG Wodehouse's A Damsel In Distress, Maud discovers Geoffrey is not the man for her when she meets him again and, besides his having grown fat in the interval, he's being served with a breach of promise suit.
 * In The Scarlet Letter, Hester's husband has been separated from her, and she (erroneously, it turns out) believes he's dead, and falls into the arms (and bed) of Reverend Dimmsdale. She becomes pregnant, thus bringing the affair into the open, and setting the story into motion.

Live-Action TV

 * 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".
 * She knew he wasn't dead. His betrayal, however, has put his wife and son into the "untouchables" category. Marrying the other guy was the only way to rid themselves of the shame. Luckily, the other guy finds out she still loves Teal'c and goes to betray him, forcing O'Neill to Murder the Hypotenuse.
 * 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
 * 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 relationships.
 * Averted with Sam's wife, who stays true, as she knows exactly what's happening to him. Also, he doesn't remember her. And.
 * 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.
 * During the final season of Zoey 101, Chase and Zoey attempt to carry on a long-distance relationship. When it doesn't work, Zoey dates James, the guys' new roommate. Even though James was the nicest guy in the world (literally. They broke up and all James said was "I get it"), he was the most hated character for getting in the way of the long-anticipated Zoey/Chase relationship. In the end, Zoey ends up breaking things off with James for Chase, but many fans boycotted much of season 4 because of the Zoey/James relationship.
 * In As Time Goes By, Lionel and Jean were in young and in love when he went to Korea. His letter back to her telling her his address got lost. When both got no letters from the other, they assumed the other had lost interest. Both married, then were either divorced or widowed, and they got together serendipitously many many years later (30 or 40) and fell in love again.
 * In an episode of Supernatural, Sam and Dean meet a woman Molly who was being chased by a ghost who was killed fifteen years ago in a car accident and she couldn't find her husband after the car crash they were in (caused by the ghost). At the end of the episode, Molly finds her husband was all right ... and married to someone else.
 * Used in In Plain Sight with a 17-year-old who had to leave his (serious) high school girlfriend to go into witness protection with his father. His girlfriend starts dating his best friend in a matter of months. Things were awkward when he turned 18, opted out, and returned.
 * A slight variation in an episode of House where a soldier's girlfriend dumped him before he went off to fight in the Middle East. At least she didn't lie and tell him she'd wait.
 * Degrassi has Leia and who breaks up with Danny in the hope that he'll want her more. He's relieved for it to be over though. Anya expects that if she's happy without Sav then he'll want her back but he realizes that he really doesn't want a manipulator.
 * On The Middle this is Played for Laughs. Sue's first boyfriend, Matt, moves to another school. They then attempt a long-distance relationship, but Matt keeps talking about this other girl he met that is showing him around the new school and being really nice to him. Sue doesn't get the hint that he's started dating the other girl until Matt outright breaks up with her.

Music

 * Soul song by The Five Stairsteps - "You Waited Too Long"
 * 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 title 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.
 * The main theme of the song Long Lost Love by Great Big Sea. He leaves home and his sweetheart for work, stays away too long, and eventually he receives a letter saying she's moved on.
 * "March to the Witch's Castle" by Funkadelic.
 * "Whiskey Lullaby" by Brad Paisley and Alison Kraus has this as its theme, coupled with guilt on the girlfriend's part. The music video's opening makes it especially clear.

Mythology

 * Older Than Feudalism: 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.
 * Subverted in The Odyssey, where everyone believes that Odysseus is dead EXCEPT his wife Penelope. Despite the hundreds of suitors that pester her and believe that Odysseus is never coming back, Penelope remains completely faithful and confident in her husband. Which, sadly, is more than can be said for Odysseus...
 * Penelope was dealing with dimwitted suitors who were happy to live off her nation while they waited for her to make a choice. Odysseus was dealing with goddesses who don't handle rejection well. He did only what he had to do to get home to his wife and not, y'know, be transformed into a pig for the rest of his life. And even when offered a goddess, he still just wanted Penelope.

Newspaper Comics

 * 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.
 * Played for laughs in a Herman comic. A man in prison tells his wife, "They gave me six weeks. Don't waste your life, Margaret. Find someone else."

Theater
"Oh, here is love, and here is truth,
 * Mocked in The Pirates of Penzance with the line:

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.
 * John, Chris' lieutenant, tells Kim, "He went crazy when he lost you, spoke to no one for a year. Then he finally said "I'm home now, my life has to go on here." So he mourned her for a year before moving on with Ellen.
 * On top of that, he thought Kim was dead. Which isn't a wild stretch of the imagination considering Kim was a hooker married to an American GI and she'd just seriously pissed off a North Vietnamese officer.
 * This is the tried-and-true Madame Butterfly plot.
 * Two Gentlemen of Verona: Proteus is sent off to visit his friend Valentine. He tearfully leaves his beloved, Julia, swearing to be faithful--and then catches a glimpse of Sylvia, the girl Valentine loves, and spends the rest of the play knee-deep in increasingly evil/ridiculous machinations to win her. In the final scene, he defects back to Julia literally as soon as she shows up again, and everyone is happy.
 * In Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World, Musa falls in love with Sheri while his fiancee Gamila is away in Cairo. When Gamila returns, the sparks start to fly.

Video Games
"Kaidan:"
 * You. Yes, you in Mass Effect 2. Assuming you romanced Kaidan, Ashley, or Liara (none of whom will join you in your adventures the second time around) in the first game and they survived only for you to choose to romance a different person in the second game, it's this. Particularly if you start a romance with one of the new love interests before meeting your old flame for their One-Scene Wonder. Depending on how that meeting goes down though, you may or may not feel guilty about it.
 * While you were, Kaidan's friends convinced him to begin seeing a doctor, since it's not like most guys expect their ex-girlfriends to . It's also eventually revealed that.


 * Ashley doesn't mention if she saw anyone while Shepard was dead, but Liara definitely didn't move on. She's been too busy, and if you romanced her in the first game,  And if you did cheat on her and mutually agree to break up, she seems to take it well and wish you happiness.
 * Shepard has a picture of whoever the romance in the first game was in his/her room. If you choose to start a new romance, it'll be turned face down... so this will come back to haunt you in the third game.
 * Amusingly, this happens to Shepard in Mass Effect 3 if was romanced.

Web Comics

 * Parodied in the webcomic Xkcd, here.
 * In Bittersweet Candy Bowl, Mike is in a Long Distance Relationship with Sandy. After he rejects a Love Confession, one of his friends invokes this by telling him flat-out he should dump Sandy and get together with the local Love Interest, as "long distance relationships never work out anyway". Mike isn't too pleased at having his feelings on the matter brushed away and his love for Sandy trivialized, and it only damages his friendship with the others.
 * Almost the entire plot of the Ciem Webcomic Series is that Candi's efforts to move after from Donte's rumored death only complicate things worse; especially when she tries to replace him with a scientist who's much more easily killed.

Western Animation
"Wife: I waited for you to come home for over three days! I, I remember how cold and lonely the nights got. By the fourth day, I knew I had to move on."
 * 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 title characters comes back from the dead to find his wife remarried to his best friend. In a subversion, it turns out that  It's unclear whether he specified the sexual aspect...
 * On Family Guy, Lois remarries Brian, who's long carried a torch for her, after Peter is lost at sea for some long but unspecified amount of time. In the end Brian gets the marriage annulled so that Lois can get back with Peter.

Real Life

 * On a particular episode of Dr. Phil was about 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.
 * There's a couple stories floating around about men who went off to fight in wars (most notably, the Mexican-American War) with their girlfriends promising to wait, and when they get back, they find out their girlfriend - didn't. Usually by walking in on their girlfriend and her lover.
 * War is not even a necessary prerequisite. At least in Russia the (un)commitment of girls waiting for their drafted boyfriends to return from the service (two years until recently and one year now) is a common topic of drama both in fiction and in real life. More often than not it can turn ugly, as the thoughts of their betrothed ones are usually among the few things that keep the conscript's spirit high throughout the army hardships and a sudden hammer slam of a letter saying "I Have Waited Long Enough" can become that last straw that breaks the camel's back and lead to violent or suicidal behavior. Sometimes they desert and venture to "sort the things out". Sometimes they take their guns with them.
 * There was a young man in World War II who freed his Jewish girlfriend from the camps by pretending to be a Nazi soldier. However, they got separated while they were trying to get out of the country. Neither waited for the other, and both got married. When they finally met up again as old folks, her husband had died but his wife had not. In a rare show of honor for this type of story (usually, in fiction at least, the old lovers get back together no matter what), the guy wouldn't leave his wife for his old flame, and she died never talking to him again.

A subtrope involves a young man going on an adventure in order to impress the object of his affections, and returning to find that she's become engaged, or even married, while he was away. (Often her choice will demonstrate that what really impresses her is a man with a steady job who can be relied on to stay by her instead of disappearing off on adventures.)

Examples:

 * The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle.
 * The Witches of Karres by James H Schmitz.
 * Stardust by Neil Gaiman.
 * Which is a subversion with this subversion.
 * Donald Swann performed a song called The Youth Of The Heart on this theme (though I don't know if he wrote it).