While there is certainly something charming about two people falling in love at first sight, typically the best romances start with the characters actually coming to appreciate each other as friends before they consider becoming lovers.
It is just the right natural progression to things.
However, a lot of romance anime tends to make it feel like the characters were never really friends before becoming lovers or they were friends for about two seconds so the series can move onto all that good romance stuff that we all enjoy.
If you are looking for romance anime where it really feels like the main couple were long-terms friends before considering romance, give these romance anime recommendations a try.
Best Romance Anime Where They Go From Friends to Lovers
Wotakoi – It’s Hard to Love an Otaku
While the characters in Wotakoi start dating in the very first episode, it is well established that they were childhood friends before that. So while the series focuses on their slow adjustment to dating, it also drops tidbits of their relationship from when they were still just friends.
It is an excellent example of how friends can bloom into something more. You don’t often just love someone immediately, it is something built through their actions.
Just Because
Just Because follows a boy who moved away from his friend group and comes back in the last year of high school. He is able to reconnect with his old friends, but there were definitely some old feelings left behind, whether they realized them back then or not.
However, Just Because is more of a coming-of-age story than it is a romance. It focuses on characters dealing with their various hurdles, some of them romantic, and in terms of satisfying romantic conclusions, it can play with your heart a bit.
Lovely Complex
In all the romance anime where the lovers start off as friends, there is no better example of it than Lovely Complex. The two main characters are best friends who act very much as best friends do. They compliment each other so perfectly that you would think they are already dating.
There is just one problem – a short boy has too hard of a time thinking of dating his very tall female friend.
It is a vain reason to not date someone, and the series really plays it perfectly as you watch both of them come to terms with their feelings and overcoming their own hurdles.
Special A
Special A follows two childhood friends that have been endlessly locked in a competition from their youth. The boy is naturally talented and wins every time while the girl is a persistent hard worker. They end up as classmates at a school for the gifted where their competition continues. However, it doesn’t take long for the series to show you that the male character is hopelessly in love with her.
This could certainly be an anime with a romantic plot that goes nowhere, but it does progress and remains one of the more underrated romantic series.
Tamako Market / Tamako Love Story
In order for the main characters of Tamako Market to be considered members of a romance anime, you actually have to watch the follow-up movie to Tamkao Market – Tamako Love Story. That’s where the romance comes in.
If you watch the anime series alone, you are left with childhood friends who function normally, but one side is blissfully dense and the other side is hopelessly, one-sidedly in love. Still, it was a nice pay off to have a whole movie dedicated to that relationship.
Myself; Yourself
Older anime can occasionally lean a bit hard on drama in the plot, and Myself;Yourself is an example of a older romance anime that leans perhaps too hard. It follows a boy who moves away, then moves back years later where he reconnects with his childhood friends.
Some of the friends are perfectly functional people while others, including the main character, are hopelessly broken by various moments of trauma that happened over those years.
Still, sometimes an old friend and childhood crush can help each other overcome that. Or, that’s what this anime suggests, anyway.
A Lull in The Sea
A Lull in the Sea is most notorious for being about a friend group who all loves somebody and that person definitely loves someone else. It is a whole lot of one-sided loves, but many of the characters have been friends since they were young children and all went to the same small school.
While the series is often very frustrating as a romance, it can be satisfying if you get behind the right ships, but guessing those ships is the hard part. If nothing else, this is one for big fans of inter-friend group drama.
Anonymous Noise
Anonymous Noise sets itself up as one of the more drama-laden love triangle romance anime series with an added dose of rock music for the plot.
A girl ends up in high school with two boys that she met and befriended separately as a child. As they were separated for some time, all three of the characters have changed from various struggles and trauma from their childhood selves. However, the voice of the main character remains the beacon that can connect them.
Fruits Basket
As Fruits Basket is such a lengthy series, there is plenty of time for the series to go from unlikely strangers to housemates to friends to something more. Furthermore, the obvious couple in the beginning may not be the couple that happens by the end, which was a refreshing twist.
Essentially, she befriends the entire family before deciding to date one of them, but there are a number of lovely breadcrumbs leading up to it that remind you that this series is a romance and not just a family drama.
Vampire Knight
Vampire Knight is a trope-filled romance where two vampires vie for the affection of one girl while hating each other. Of course they have both known her since childhood and also been in love with her.
At the beginning of the series, both boys are friends with the female main character, but clearly also already have affection for her.
It is kind of difficult to call them friends since it really is just a bunch of flirting with each other right from the get go. As such, I’ll leave the decision as to if it qualifies in your hands.
Toradora
I hesitated to include this series purely because, while they go from being outcasts to friends quickly, it becomes increasingly clear that there are romantic inclinations going on pretty early in the series.
Toradora has the set up of two misunderstood individuals becoming friends and agreeing to help each other woo their crushes, each of which the other is good friends with. Of course, you soon see that while they work perfectly as friends, there are feelings that are brewing under the surface and going unacknowledged. It is one of the most charming ways to utilize a tsundere character.
Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun
This series pulled a bit of an Uno Reverse card on rom-com anime fans. It starts with a confession, but the male main character is so dense that he thought she was a fan of his manga instead. So instead of becoming his girlfriend, she becomes his manga assistant.
They then spend the entire rest of the anime series becoming closer friends as they work on his manga together.
That said, as the series goes on, it does start to give you some of those romance anime breadcrumbs of a more romantic relationship forming. However, Nozaki is about as dense as osmium, so things move slowly.
My Dress-Up Darling
Slow moving romances may be pretty frustrating to many, but they do a great job of establishing the characters becoming friends.
In My Dress-Up Darling, the characters went from no interaction with each other, even as classmates, to working together to make cosplay. However, as they spend time together doing that, the female character begins to realize that she might just love him while he remains blissfully unaware that anyone could ever have romantic feelings about him.
Unfortunately, as is common with slow moving romances, you aren’t likely to get the romantic progression that romance anime junkies really crave.
Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove It
For about one second in this series, the main couple are simply colleagues working in a science lab at their university. Then a love confession happens. However, over the course of this absolutely adorable science-themed rom-com you also discover that the characters have been colleagues for awhile and even, unbeknownst to them, met as children.
They aren’t two people that just met. They know each other’s mannerisms, and already know exactly why they fell in love with each other. Even if the series is all about proving that they do indeed love each other through scientific formulae.
Adachi and Shimamura
The absolutely most charming thing about Adachi and Shimamura is the series fully documents the characters becoming friends before becoming anything more. They were both somewhat adrift or outcasted, and needed someone that they could fully be themselves with. Over the course of this series, you see those feelings being to transform as the characters wonder if they feel more about each other than just friends would feel. It teases and teases until finally pushing things past the edge.
It is the type of romance that focuses on the early relationship of a couple, so you don’t get a lot of romantic pay off, but what you do get leaves you feeling plenty warm and fuzzy.
Do you have more romance anime where the characters start off as friends before they become lovers? Let fans know in the comments section below.
