Sounds like bad fanfiction to me

"'There's something tremendously suggestive in that fancy of yours, that tradition has misrepresented the real feelings of all the great heroes and heroines; or rather, has only handed down to us the official statement of their sentiments, as an epitaph records the obligatory virtues which the defunct ought to have had, if he hadn't. That theory, now, that Odysseus never really forgot Circe; and that Esther was in love with Haman, and decoyed him to the banquet with Ahasuerus just for the sake of once having him near her and hearing him speak; and that Dante, perhaps, if he could have been brought to book, would have had to confess to caring a great deal more for the pietosa donna of the window than for the mummified memory of a long-dead Beatrice -- well, you know, it tallies wonderfully with the inconsequences and surprises that one is always discovering under the superficial fitnesses of life.'"

Edith Wharton, "That Good May Come," The New York Stories of Edith Wharton

Had Wharton known how incredibly overused that idea would be in about a hundred years or so, I submit that she might not have let her characters romanticize it quite so much.