When it comes to romance anime, there are a lot of easy premises. The kind where you kind of just let the plot unfold as it naturally would so it doesn’t involve so much writing.
One of those “easy” romance anime plots is where the main couple starts as a fake couple.
Maybe they want to make someone jealous, get flirty classmates off their case, or just to look like someone can love them. Of course, we know that eventually that fake relationship is going to become a real one.
If this trope is kind of your jam, you have quite a bit of romance series to choose from.
Best Fake Couple Romance Anime
Nisekoi
This is the most well-known series and often gives people a taste for fake relationships in anime. Hopefully, that leads to anime relationships that have more romantic progression than this series had.
In Nisekoi, the main characters come from opposing Yakuza families. In order to stop a war, they must pretend to be dating to keep the peace.
Oreshura
Similar to Nisekoi, this is another infamous series for this set up. In it, the main man is put off by love due to his love-addled parents. He studies hard and swears off ever experiencing it.
However, the main girl, noticing his apathy, decides to blackmail him into becoming her boyfriend to stop others from constantly asking her out. Oh-so-obviously it becomes more.
Wolf Girl and Black Prince
In order to fit in, the main girl makes up a boyfriend and snaps a photo of a hottie on the street to give a face to her friends.
Unfortunately, he goes to her school. He ends up agreeing to pretend to be her boyfriend if she agrees to become his dog.
Thankfully, it ends up much sweeter than that synopsis makes it sound.
Scum’s Wish
Neither can be with the person that they really want to be with, so they end up together. Their arrangement is almost purely for sex and comfort with no real feelings involved.
Scum’s Wish, unlike many of these other series, is not a warm and fuzzy romantic series. It is actually one where everyone kind of people garbage people.
Love and Lies
This series has an interesting premise where every person is paired up at a certain age with someone selected for them.
Unfortunately for the main character, he fell in love naturally.
So now he has to deal with these feelings of love and a new partner they paired him with. The premise forms a pretty intense emotional series.
Magical Warfare
This is more of a sub-plot in Magical Warfare.
The series is action-heavy, but there is a part in which the main character becomes the pretend boyfriend to his childhood friend.
She keeps getting flirted with and even had a traumatic incident with a stalker, and this is one easily solved problem for him.
My Bride is a Mermaid
Having spotted a mermaid, the main character of this series must marry her or else she will be killed by her family.
So begins the very strange relationship between strangers as well as their odd and supernatural family.
This is a comedy series, for sure, but there are some nice moments as the pair actually get to know each other and form a real relationship.
Engaged to the Unidentified
Due to an agreement between their elders, Kobeni finds out on her birthday that she is engaged.
Her betrothed and his sister move into the home, and later on she discovers that they are actually supernatural beings.
Over time real feelings do start to develop, but this show is more of a comedy than a romance.
Love Tyrant
This is a more silly example of trying to fake a relationship.
The show revolves around a Kiss Note.
Yes, much like a Death Note, if you write two names in it, they will kiss. Unfortunately, the wielder of the Kiss Note misspelled a name while carrying out her yaoi shipping and now the main characters has to find someone he wants to kiss.
If he doesn’t, the wielder will die and he will forever remain a virgin. This is infinitely more of a comedy show about trying to fake love.
Please Teacher
In this series, a boy accidentally witnesses an alien descend to Earth. She also ends up becoming his homeroom teacher.
Even further complicating things, the principal forces them to marry to clear up a misunderstanding caused by the secret he knows. While he does marry her so she can continue teaching, they are very much a fake couple who gets to know each other through forced proximity.
Rent-a-Girlfriend
When the whole basis for the relationships in the show is that the main character is paying for a girlfriend to spend time with him, it’s pretty fake relationships.
However, while that is bad, the series also has another layer of fake relationships too. As their grandmothers discover they were spending time together, the main character and the first girlfriend he paid to spend time with him fake begin a couple to their family.
Spice and Wolf
While Spice and Wolf isn’t a “romance anime,” the relationship between the pair plays a large part in the show.
You watch them travel, talk too much about medieval economics, and grow closer to each other over time much like you would in a romance anime. The plot just is driven by other things.
In Spice and Wolf, you see the pair often tell people that they are a married couple traveling together. What are they supposed to tell them? That she’s a wolf goddess and he was forced to give her a ride after she stowed away naked in his cart? Like anyone would believe that.
More Than a Married Couple, But Not Lovers
This series features a school that has a sort of “marriage practical” in which it pairs two students up randomly and grades them based on how they interact with each other as a couple.
As the two main characters paired together actually have crushes on someone else, they pretend to be the perfect couple so they can score highly and earn the right to switch partners.
The seasoned romance anime fans knows exactly how this will play out – They develop feelings for each other.
A Couple of Cuckoos
It is not that they are faking being a couple so much as they are forced to be one in A Couple of Cuckoos.
After an accident switched the the children of two families at birth, they decide to meet and suggest that the kids just get married so they don’t split up the families. Hours before this dinner, the two switched children meet by accident, where the girl suggests that he be her fake boyfriend so her parents don’t make her get married.
This series leans into the trope, but it doesn’t progress quite the way you think. This actually serves as a nice refreshing change for this pretty stale trope.
Spy x Family
Why fake being a couple when you can fake being a whole family?
That’s what Spy X Family does. Loid is a super spy, and his newest mission requires him to infiltrate the inner circle of a target that only goes to school functions for his kid. As such, he gets an orphan (who can also read minds) to play his daughter and a wife (who is secretly an assassin using him as a cover) so he can carry out the mission.
Now, Spy x Family isn’t a romance anime. However, when it is not carrying comical and surprisingly action-dense shenanigans, it is a rather wholesome family show.
Do you have more romance anime recommendations where they are a fake couple at first? Let fans know in the comments section below.
Rent A Girlfriend should be included here
It is there