In this painting by Edvard Munch, alternatively titled "Death and the Maiden", the scrawny skeleton symbolizing death holds a beautiful young maiden in his arms as he kisses her. The association of death with love can be viewed through either the inevitable restraint of time in life or as a picture of the sinfulness of eroticism in the wrong contexts. Love is traditionally viewed as a beautiful thing, but it can also closely be associated with feelings of melancholia.

The idea of melancholy in love can exist for many different reasons. This may be caused by unrequited love, such as in the story of Phoebus and Daphne. In this story, he loved Daphne but she prayed to her father to remove her beauty so she would not be chased by lovers anymore. She was then transformed into a beautiful laurel tree, so even though it is a tragic example of love melancholy, it ends with beauty and Phoebus promising to use her branches for his weapons. In another story of love melancholy, Lanval has a lover who is unbeknownst to the rest of the world and is unable to tell anyone about her. When he brags about her beauty to the queen, he thinks he has lost her love forever. Everyone else is so mystified by his intense love that "they cursed such a love as mad" (Marie de France 11). However, this is just another example of how love melancholy is displayed in literature.

The love between two people causing melancholy is not only a historic idea, however. Binding your life and happiness to another person's is always a risky move to make in the game of love, and there is always the possibility for even the happiest of relationships to end in sadness, melancholy, and heartbreak. Babb summarizes this idea in his essay on love melancholy by saying "though lovers be merry sometimes, and rapt beyond themselves for joy, yet most part, Love is a plague, a torture, an hell, a bitter-sweet passion at last" (Babb 119).

Blackmore even explores a term for love melancholy that encapsulates the many reasons love can cause pain: coita d'amor, which translates to affliction of love. This term covers "unrequited love, jealousy, intense desire or lovesickness, or the anguish created by the absence of the beloved" (Blackmore 641). The theme of these kinds of love melancholy are prevalent through literature, but the beauty within it is sometimes not as obvious. However, the joy and happiness associated with love are the counterparts to the pain and sadness.