The world is filled with people who are fundamentally different from each other. For many, their lives will never intersect.
However, sometimes there are moments where two very different people meet and fill what was once a void in each other. They show each other a different side of the world that they may have never seen, and do so from a viewpoint they might never have.
Oil and water, fire and ice, pizza and taco – the delightful set up of two people that seem completely opposed to each other finding the common ground we all share, then love blooming from being something one needs from the other is a popular trope in anime.
Sometimes you see it buddy cop-type shows. Sometimes you see between shounen protagonists and their rivals. Yet, there is no more satisfying place to see opposites attract than in a romance anime.
If you are looking for romantic couples that couldn’t be more different from each other, then check out these anime recommendations below.
Best Romance Anime Where Opposites Attract
I Can’t Understand What My Husband is Saying
I Can’t Understand What My Husband is Saying is a romance anime about a strong potential reality that any anime fan may face – loving a normie.
I Can’t Understand What My Husband is Saying follows a happily married couple that seem fairly different from each other. The wife is a social drinking workaholic office lady and the husband is an unemployed otaku who writes an anime blog.
While this seems like a recipe rife for potential conflict, I Can’t Understand What My Husband Is Saying is a romance that focuses on what can bring people together rather than what can drive them apart.
Your Lie in April
If you are in the mood to send your heart on a rollercoaster, then strap in and get ready for the ride that is Your Lie in April.
Infamous as a potential tear-jerker, Your Lie in April follows a gifted musician whose musical ability is left paralyzed by chronic depression after the death of his mother. However, after a run-in with a vibrant girl who is also an unconventional musician, his gray world floods with color once again.
As she helps him regain his passion for music, other romantic feelings start to bloom between them.
Toradora
Ryuuji has the face of a thug, but the kind and caring demeanor of a househusband.
Taiga is small and as beautiful as a doll, but with a vicious tsundere temper.
They are both outcasted by the preconceived notions of how they should act based on how they look, but a chance encounter binds them together in the shared tasks of getting their crushes to notice their affections.
Of course, we all know how that will go.
My Little Monster
My Little Monster offers you fire and ice.
You have a heroine who is frigid to her peers and only focused on studying forced to take schoolwork to a fiery, chaotic delinquent boy that hasn’t been to school since he got into a fight on the first day.
However, if you were hoping for a studious/rebel sort of dynamic – this isn’t it.
Instead, My Little Monster give you more “slowly warming icy girl and her silly, but protective guard dog” vibes as she rejects his initially lovesick advances only to realize that feelings for him started to bloom in her own heart somewhere along the way.
Given
In all truth, if you like opposites attract as a romantic set up, boy’s love romance is rife with it. A rather large portion of boy’s love romance happens between characters where the only thing they have in common is that they are both men.
Given, a series part of the new wave of boy’s love anime that doesn’t have men just be horny assault monsters to each other, follows the building romance between a blunt, brash musician and a quiet, spacey, chronically depressed classmate that he was teaching to play guitar.
Say I Love You”
A popular person and an unpopular person falling in love is a long-beloved set up for romance, and it won’t be the last time you see it at play on this list.
Say “I Love You” follows a gloomy unpopular girl who has shut herself from trying to connect to other people after a traumatic incident at school when she was younger. She has a chance run-in with a dazzlingly handsome and popular boy that falls for her at first sight – or, at first kick, in this case.
As these things go, he is enamored by how different she is from other girls, and their relationship helps put salve on their own equally damaged teenage hearts.
Kimi ni Todoke
Incredibly similar to Say “I Love You” mentioned above, but not quite as sometimes melancholy, Kimi ni Todoke offers a more pleasant exploration of a popular boy falling in love with an outcasted girl.
In Kimi ni Todoke, a popular athletic boy encourages a lonely girl whose kind actions are often misinterpreted as malicious due to her scary, gloomy looks to reach out to others.
While Kimi ni Todoke is a sweet romance, it is a slow-moving one. Instead, the series is often most focused on the heroine’s personal growth as she makes meaningful connections with people – beyond just romantic ones – for the first time.
My Dress-Up Darling
Romance between gyaru girls and unpopular boys is a quickly growing sub-genre of its own. And My Dress Up Darling really brought that dynamic into the spotlight.
My Dress-Up Darling follows a sensitive boy who has trouble connecting to people due to his insecurity about his passion for making traditional Japanese Hina dolls like his grandfather. He has a clandestine crossing with a popular gyaru girl that is, as it turns out, a huge passionate otaku that likes to cosplay her favorite characters. With his skill at sewing, he starts helping her make her cosplay outfits.
While romance moves slow due to the standard issue lack of communication, My Dress-Up Darling never misses a chance to show that the feelings are mutual between this odd pair.
My Love Story
As the story about a man with a heart of gold, but the face of a gorilla getting his first ultra-cute girlfriend, the differences between the main couple in My Love Story are plain to see.
He is strong with a scary face, and she is cute, small, and a bit meek. However, while they look greatly different, My Love Story proves that they are both the same on the inside.
Both sides of this main couple are sweet idiots over the moon for each other. So while they may look like opposites, they are only opposite on the outside.
Citrus
Like boy’s love, girl’s love romance is no stranger to opposites attracting. Unfortunately, Citrus is perhaps not the most wholesome yuri romance to serve as representation – with a proclivity to lean towards fetishization and dubious lines of consent – but it is the best example of opposites attracting.
Citrus follows two new step-sisters. One is a friendly and fashionable gyaru-type girl while the other is the stern, strict Student Council president at her school. Their close proximity at home and school leads to steamy, complicated, confusing new feelings.
3D Girlfriend
Often the major thing to take away from romances where opposites attract is that you shouldn’t judge people based on looks alone.
3D Girlfriend is yet another romance exploring that, and yet another romance exploring that with an otaku dating far out their perceived league.
In 3D Girlfriend, a bitter otaku is forced to clean the pool as punishment with a seemingly vapid beautiful and popular girl – exactly the type of girl her hates. However, he finds her quite different from how he expects, with accepting parts of him that everyone else would quickly reject due to her own complicated life circumstances.
Beastars
Beastars takes opposites attract to a whole new level.
In Beastars, you following the blooming romance between a gentle-hearted wolf that fights his own predatory nature and a rabbit that embraces their proclivity for procreation.
While many see the anthropomorphic animal people – sometimes obvious CGI – and give Beastars a pass, it is a alluring romance that comes from a dark, vicious, and surprisingly deep pool.
The Dangers in My Heart
The Dangers in My Heart starts a little edgy for some romance fans, but evens out into something adorable just as quickly.
In The Dangers in My Heart, you follow an outcast who frequently reads books about murder and anatomy for when he one day kills someone to vent his dark brewing rage. The most frequent target of his daydreams is the popular girl in his class. However, after starting to frequently run into her in the library where she hides to satisfy her voracious apatite for snacks, he realized that the feelings he had for her weren’t hate – they were love.
While the main couple in this series is different in every way, right down to their height-gap, The Dangers in My Heart is as sweet of a romance as it is an exploration of why young people have edgy violent feelings in adolescence.
My Level 999 Love For Yamada-kun
Notable for also being a rare post-breakup romance, My Level 999 Love For Yamada-kun is also a refreshingly modern romance between two different types of gamers.
The heroine in My Level 999 Love For Yamada-kun is freshly broken up with by her cheating boyfriend. She meets an icy, blunt guildmate at a fan event for the MMO she casually plays and passes him off as her new boyfriend to make her ex jealous.
From there, this cheerful girl gets to know this stoic boy more, discovering that he is a man that loves deeply and shows it through his actions even if it doesn’t show up on his face.
Ouran High School Host Club
Ouran High School Host Club follows a girl attending a prestigious school for the wealthy on a scholarship. While she is dressed like a boy for comfort and function, things become complicated when she is forced to join a secret host club in the school where handsome boys entertain wealthy girls as a host to pay off an expensive vase she broke.
The opposites attract comes into play between the tomboyish heroine who falls in love with the dazzlingly handsome leader of the host club that became smitten with her first.
From wealth-gap to their laid-back versus neurotic personalities, these two may both look like handsome boys, but they couldn’t have more opposite personalities.
Do you have more romance anime where opposites attract? Let fans know in the comments section below.
