Marvel fans know that the Mad Titan Thanos is obsessed with death. In the MCU films, Thanos is obsessed with correcting the overabundance of life in the universe by killing half the population. But in the comics, Thanos is actually in love with the physical personification of Death, who appears to him as an unattainable, impossibly desirable, skull-faced woman (or a silent, human-like being).
The dynamic is unchanged in the minds of most fans: Thanos endlessly craving Death for himself as his one and only mistress, and her denying him approval and affection, pushing him to achieve greater and greater feats of devotion. But there's one thing wrong with this picture. As an Eternal who carries the Deviant gene, Thanos has lived a very long life – and once spent many years traveling the galaxy trying to live... like other men. This led him to take on many wives and girlfriends. So many, in fact, that he made famous womanizers like Tony Stark and Hercules look like amateurs by comparison!
This startling revelation about Thanos’ past was revealed in Jason Aaron and Simone Bianchi’s miniseries Thanos Rising which reveals the secret origin of the Mad Titan. The story showed that although Thanos did kill a great many people in his youth, he attempted to justify his actions by claiming the murders were scientific experiments to help him discover who he is and why he enjoys killing so much. Despite his bloodlust, he felt genuine guilt after he buried the bodies of his victims and swore an oath never to kill again.
To fulfill his oath, Thanos left his birthplace of Titan and took on a menial job as a navigator for a gang of space pirates. Although he helped the pirates go to many different planets where they murdered and pillaged, he did not take part in the killings himself. Instead, he tried seducing and sleeping with as many women as possible. As his travels took him across the galaxy, Thanos ended up having alien girlfriends, lovers, and wives of every conceivable species.
Most of these women were attracted to Thanos’ power and nature, yet Thanos himself found he felt nothing for his lovers and eventually admitted he was just going through the motions with each one. He even sired many children, but found each of his sons and daughters only resembled their mothers, not himself (although strangely, this may not have been the case and Thanos could have just refused to see himself in the children). By doing this, Thanos hoped that he could achieve some degree of normalcy and happiness by just acting like a normal man.
However, his efforts proved to be in vain and none of the women Thanos slept with provided him the solace or love that he wanted. A few of his wives even picked up on the fact that Thanos was only pretending to listen to them and care for them, but continued to hold out hope that Thanos was not a cruel man. Unfortunately, this proved their undoing when Thanos — finally convinced that he loved only Lady Death — visited each of his past lovers and killed them all.
His continued pursuit of Death proved a largely fruitless attempt as she refused to speak to him, causing him to slaughter greater numbers of people to please her — but now readers know that Thanos, far from being the celibate, faithful lover he appeared — actually spent a great portion of his life sowing his wild oats across more worlds than most could ever dream.