Iconic Peanuts Quote About Love Remains a Defining Comic Strip Line After 62 Years

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

Charlie Brown, unlucky in love

I originally planned to look for the best Peanuts quote about falling in love. The more I started digging, the more I realized that heartbreak was a more enduring theme than true love. My search eventually led me to the best Peanuts quote about love, though it was far from what I was expecting.

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 unnamed Little Red-Haired Girl. He had a girlfriend for a few years in the 1990s named Peggy Jean, whom he met at summer camp, but 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.

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

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

After that much digging, I realized that Peanuts had far more insight into heartbreak than into the lighter side of love. Schulz’s work is sometimes seen as overly sweet, but the content of his comic strip was much subtler and often cynical. That is why the best Peanuts quote about love is downright depressing, illustrating just how much unrequited love weighs on a person.

It comes from a 1964 comic strip where Charlie Brown is all alone, 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. Then 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 with a memorable line.

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

That sounds and tastes about right.

Source: Polygon