I Will Wait for You/Playing With

Basic Trope: A character waits for a very, very long time for their beloved to return.
 * Straight: Bob goes off to war and is killed; Alice never gets the news and waits at home for years and years for him to return.
 * Exaggerated: Bob goes off to war and gets killed; Alice is cryogentically frozen so that she can literally wait forever.
 * Justified: Alice was truly and deeply in love with Bob and feels like life isn't even worth living without him.
 * Alternatively: Alice was prophesied to live with Bob.
 * Inverted: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder
 * Subverted: Alice says she will wait forever, but after a few years finally gives up and begins a new relationship with a man.
 * Double Subverted: Alice's relationship with the second man fails because she's still in love with Bob, and no-one else can make her happy.
 * The second man is actually Bob, finally back from the war, but drastically changed.
 * Parodied: Alice's story sparks a reality TV show where viewers tune in to watch Alice wait for her love, hoping to see the ultimate reunion.
 * Bob goes out to the shops and Alice stands on the balcony gazing wistfully after him until he gets back a couple of hours later.
 * Deconstructed: The years of waiting with no other contact have taken a toll on Alice's psyche, so by the time Bob does get home, Alice is clinically depressed. Having pinned all her hopes on their relationship, she's built up what has been a fairly minor fling into a Love Story for the Ages, while Bob has seen her as little more than a glorified penpal - the discrepancy causes a lot of tension, with Bob feeling obliged to stay with a woman he doesn't really love because of the sacrifice she made.
 * Reconstructed: She may have blown the relationship out of proportion in her mind, but Bob is of a similarly romantic nature and is all the more in love with her for the fact that she waited.
 * Zig Zagged: Alice waits for decades for Bob to come home, but he actually does. However, the next day, Alice is shipped off to war as a nurse, so Bob ends up having to wait around... when she gets back, it's revealed she had left because she''d finally gotten ove rhim, and while overseas she met someone else.
 * Averted: Bob is never killed and comes home right after his time in the war is over
 * Enforced: The writer lost a loved one in a war who they are still waiting for
 * Lampshaded: "What are you going to do, Alice, wait around forever?"
 * Invoked: Alice and Bob promise each other to wait for the other one forever.
 * Defied: After a year or so of not hearing from Bob, Alice gets sick of waiting and goes off to look for him.
 * Discussed: "You see Alice? She's been waiting for her lost husband for 25 years now..."
 * Conversed: "If I went off to war and went MIA, how long would you wait?"

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