5 Famous Love Stories From History That Were Weird As Hell

Kahlo and Rivera were devoted communists, and Rivera was such a big fan of Trotsky that he convinced the Mexican government to offer Trotsky asylum after Stalin chased him out of town. The couple put Trotsky and his wife up in their house, and pretty much immediately, Kahlo set her sights on the revolutionary. It worked a charm. For years afterward, she taunted her husband with the affair. It might have worked a little too well, as Kahlo predictably got bored with it in a hurry, while Trotsky remained hopelessly infatuated. Exasperated by a nine-page love letter he sent her, she forwarded it to a friend the same way women today share screenshots of creeps sliding into their DMs, writing, "I am very tired of the old man."

She soon grew very tired of the old man indeed, and both halves of the marriage split politically from Trotsky. Kahlo was even brought in for questioning after Trotsky's assassination because she happened to be pals with the guy who killed him, which is exactly the kind of final twist that gets you on Springer for sure.

Finally, when Henry's ex-wife needed a favor from Colette, she sent her then-16-year-old son to butter her up, though she probably didn't intend it in that way. Sure enough, exactly what she feared would happen did. Though Colette had let herself go a little over the years, she was still smokin' in her way, and the boy, Bertrand, was hypnotized. She wasted no time ensnaring him in her web, taking him on a luxury vacation and gifting him a copy of her novel Cheri, which happens to be about a relationship between a 49-year-old woman and a 25-year-old man, inscribed with the words "My CHERIshed son Bertrand de Jouvenal." Nice.

In no time, they were humpin' like French bunnies, and they did so off and on for the next five years. When Bertrand was 20, Colette spitefully confessed the affair to her husband, ending their marriage. She and Bertrand began openly dating, and Colette was back in the 1920s French version of Gawker. His parents tried to lure him away with an engagement to an appropriate young woman, but on the day of his engagement dinner, Bertrand couldn't help but visit Colette "one last time." She decided to pick that day to tell him she loved him for the first time, and the engagement was decidedly off. Their relationship ended for good the next year, but Bertrand continued to think and speak fondly of her. We just weren't doing a very good job of teaching kids concepts like "grooming" back then.

She was also inconveniently already married to Marquis Florent-Claude du Chatelet. It wasn't exactly domestic bliss; she was expected to marry when she came of age, so she simply picked a guy who was in the army and therefore wouldn't be around to bug her too much. He managed to bug her enough to give her three children, but it was an open secret that Emilie and her husband led separate lives.

As such, when Voltaire's writing got him in trouble with the French government, as it often did, Emilie suggested that he hide out on one of her husband's many estates. It wasn't like her husband would give a franc. But to sweeten the deal, Voltaire agreed to pay to renovate the place. This included such luxuries as a bathtub, a kitchen, and a 20,000-book library, which means it may as well have been the Jetsons' house at the time. Everyone was happy, and Voltaire and Emilie lived on the property for many years before cordially parting ways. It was possibly the most functional extramarital relationship in history.

It's not quite as weird as it sounds. Her mother's grave was a special place for her. Mary Wollstonecraft, an acclaimed writer and feminist, died only days after giving birth to her namesake, so little Mary often spent time at the grave reading her work, seeking comfort in the mother she never knew. After a teenage Mary and one of her father's fans, Percy Bysshe Shelley, started making eyes at each other, it was only natural for her to take him to her special place to hang out. To anyone else, it might have seemed a little creepy, but Percy was a poet, so it was probably a turn-on. Maybe too much of a turn-on.

Eventually, at one of these graveyard-and-chill meetups, one thing led to another, and well ... it sure seems like that's where they had sex for the first time. We know for certain that they had sex around that time, and they "declared their love and became intimate" at the gravestone, which sounds as much like 19th-century code for spooky bonin' as anything. It certainly makes sense. It's clear from her work that Mary Shelley was obsessed with reanimation, and scholars have theorized that she saw herself as a reanimation of sorts of the dead woman who shared her name. Talk about "rising from the grave." It's a good thing Freud hadn't been born yet; he'd have had a field day with this one.

For more, check out 5 Movie Relationships That Are Secretly Terrifying:

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