What would Petrarch's love poetry have looked like had the love been requited? It is hard to know, because his poetry for Laura is so essentially about passions unfulfilled. However, Petrarch did have the opportunity, at least, to write of love realized. As Gordon Braden has noted, though the poet was never married, he had two children for whom he apparently felt a deep fondness; yet the woman or women who gave birth to these children cannot be found in his verse. Braden has voiced frustration at Petrarch's refusal to record experiences of domestic affection: “It is hard for modern readers not to miss that poetry and to feel that its lack measures the oppressive narrowness of Petrarchan lyricism.”

Yet a number of Petrarch's followers did step off this “narrow” path. Francesca Turina, featured in Chapter 2 for her friendship with Capoleone Ghelfucci, published a great quantity of verses for her husband in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Among these, in her 1628 collection, was a trio of sonnets about her first pregnancy and the miscarriage that ended it. She describes great grief at the event, narrating how her mourning was both entwined with, and eased by, the love she shared with her husband.