Classic Peanuts Quote on Unrequited Love Endures After 62 Years

One of the most enduring themes of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comics is young love. More specifically, it is unrequited young love. Throughout his 50 years of drawing the comic strip, Charles Schulz almost never featured a great love story where both parties felt the same way about each other. Instead, one kid would pine for the affections of another while the other kid wanted nothing to do with them. That is sad, but it forms part of the real-world quality in the work of Charles Schulz. Some strips featured a beagle flying an airplane, yet the slice-of-life adventures of Charlie Brown and the gang have kept the comic perpetually relatable.

I originally planned to look for the best Peanuts quote about falling in love. I wanted something touching and profound that you might find on a Valentine’s Day card. The more I started digging, however, the more I realized that heartbreak was a more enduring theme than true love in the comic strip. My search eventually led me to the best Peanuts quote about love, though it was far from what I expected.

Charlie Brown is the star of Peanuts, so I looked to him first for the perfect quote about love. All I found was heartbreak, mostly with him being too afraid to speak with the otherwise unnamed Little Red-Haired Girl. He did have a girlfriend for a few years in the 1990s named Peggy Jean, whom he met at summer camp. She eventually moved away without telling Charlie Brown how to reach her. When they finally reconnect, she has a boyfriend.

Charlie Brown has also been on the other end of this equation. Peppermint Patty and her best friend Marcie both harbor crushes on good ol’ Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown does not feel the same way about either of them, leaving them as high and dry as the Little Red-Haired Girl and Peggy Jean left him.

I thought of Lucy next. While Lucy is probably the least tender character in the Peanuts gang, she loves to dispense advice. Her advice is usually terrible, but I thought she might have accidentally said something insightful about true love. Lucy is no better at love than Charlie Brown is, and arguably even worse than him. She regularly crushes on Schroeder, pouring out her affections while putting her head on his piano. Schroeder is not just uninterested, but admits that he is able to barely tolerate Lucy.

Charlie Brown’s little sister, Sally, regularly deals with rejection. She longs for her Sweet Baboo, who is her brother’s friend Linus. Linus only seems annoyed by her affections, especially when she calls him her Sweet Baboo.

After that much digging, I realized that Peanuts had far more insight into heartbreak than it did about the lighter side of love. The work of Charles Schulz is sometimes seen as overly sweet, bordering on downright saccharine. His characters have adorned all kinds of corny Hallmark cards, but the content of his comic strip was much subtler and at times a bit cynical. That is why the best Peanuts quote about love is not uplifting. It is downright depressing, illustrating just how much unrequited love dampens your whole existence.

The line comes from a 1964 comic strip where Charlie Brown is all alone and about to eat his lunch. He talks to himself about how much he loves the Little Red-Haired Girl and how she seems entirely unaware of his existence. He takes a bite of his sandwich and reacts with a disgusted bleah. In the final panel, he sums up love in the Peanuts comic strip by delivering a memorable line.

“Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter like unrequited love!”

That sounds and tastes about right.

Source: Polygon