Old Flame Fizzle

Sometimes absence makes the heart fonder than its object deserves. . . .

Jane is delighted to meet someone again. Perhaps it's Jill, her Best Friend Forever in school; perhaps it's Jack, whom she was engaged to, and whom she has waited for.

Within minutes of their meeting, she realizes this is a big mistake. One or both of them have changed so much, or she realizes what she had never seen before. In an inversion of Oblivious to Love, Jane may realize that she has long fallen out of love, and quite often, that she was Oblivious to Love in a third character.

Tends to be treated far more sympathetically than Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder. Inverse of New Old Flame.

Compare Growing Up Sucks if the two met as children.

Examples of Old Flame Fizzle include:

Anime and Manga

• An episode of Rumic Theater has a man being invited to a school reunion by a girl he remembers having a crush on, and who might just have reciprocated, but he was transferred out before he could learn the truth. His current married life is...disappointing, and he fantasizes about having a fling while simultaneously realizing how unlikely that would be. At the reunion he meets the woman who reveals that she did have a crush on him, and is conveniently recently divorced...and is now grossly overweight, not one bit pretty and a sloppy drunk. He decides to bail out early. On his way to the train, the men meets the actual girl he was thinking of (both women have the same given name) who is just as pretty and likeable as he remembers...and is happily married with several children who made her late for the reunion. He returns home somewhat heartened and determined to make his own marriage work.
• Patlabor: In the New Files series, it's revealed that Takeo Kumagami once had a relationship with Richard Wong. This naturally leads to a confrontation between the exes, just before he makes his escape. Wong trolls her by pretending to give himself up, because of his feelings for her. She falls for it, he scoops up her up, then dumps her... in a laundry basket and runs off. Needless to say, Kumigami considers them DONE.

Literature

• In PG Wodehouse's A Damsel In Distress, Maud meets her beloved Geoffrey—who's turned fat and obsessed with food, and her heart is breaking at the thought she has pledged herself to him, when he gets a break of promise suit served on him. She goes off to find the man who helped her meet him and propose marriage.
• In Dorothy L. Sayers's Gaudy Night, Harriet Vane goes to Gaudy Night to meet an old school friend. Within minutes, they are making painfully polite inquires about the other's life, and Harriet is thinking it's terrible, and she should never have come.
• In L. M. Montgomery's A Tangled Web, used twice.
  • Jocelyn left her husband on her wedding night because she had fallen in Love At First Sight with the best man. When he returns and is not the stuff of romantic dreams, she reconciles with her husband.
  • When Noel has jilted Gay to take up with Nan, and Nan has jilted him in turn, he comes back to Gay. She realizes how false he is, and laughs.
• Eva Ibbotson's Dial-a-Ghost has the son of the ghost family portrayed with a long term crush on a Cynthia Harbottle. When she turns up as a ghost in the final chapter, she is old, plump and selfish.
• In Edgar Rice Burroughs's Fighting Man of Mars, Tan Hadron has this twice: the first time, he convinces himself that the woman is just dispirited from her captivity, but the second time, he realizes the truth and repulses her.
• In Jack Campbell's The Lost Fleet series, an old love of Captain Desjani is one of the prisoners they rescue. Desjani soon realizes that he changed in the prison camp, and he starts to have an affair with a subordinate, for which he was transfered.
  • In Dreadnaught, Rione has more than a touch of this with her husband, long a prisoner of war.
• In Michael Flynn's The January Dancer, Hugh finds that Fire Forged Friendship faded over time, and one such friend resents his return.
• In PG Wodehouse's Jill The Reckless, Jill had deliberately thrown herself into work, far from Derek, to recover from him, and just before the meeting, noted that it had worked. Nevertheless, meeting him again reinforced that.

Live Action TV

• How I Met Your Mother: After years of searching, Ted found the "Slutty Pumpkin," a girl he fell in love with at a party but he never saw again. Both Ted and the girl found the relationship awkward, but neither wanted to break it off because they thought the other person was into the relationship.
• Shameless (US version): Fiona starts flirting with the guy she had a crush on in high school, but once the have a very awkward sexual encounter Fiona doesn't feel the same anymore.
• This happens for Scully in The X-Files. In medical school, she had an affair with a professor. Once she found out he was married, she was horrified and left medical school to join the FBI. Ten years later, she runs into this professor, who is in the hosptial for a heart condition. She is understandably perplexed as to why he's in Washington D.C., and he explains that his wife is now dead and he's come to invite her to run away with him. However, Scully is now ten years older, wiser, and has a life of her own now. It's an episode that is a major reality check for Scully about where her life has gone and what it could have been. In the end, she turns down the offer and realizes she likes the way her life has turned out. This also marks the start of Mulder and Scully's sexual relationship.

Music

• The Garth Brooks song "Every Time That It Rains" tells of a romantic encounter between the narrator and a waitress. They try to go for a second date but it's just not the same and they decide to be just friends.