For as common as it is in romance, anime doesn’t actually depict too many breakups. Romance anime loves to focus on love at first sight and, in recent years, has even given up on telling romance stories with any sort of real relationship drama. Everyone loves pleasant fluff in the romance genre, but that does also tend to shape unrealistic expectations that a relationship will never turn sour.
While a much smaller collection, there are a few romance anime recommendations that do acknowledge that couples breakup. What’s more, you will also find them to be the most “real” in terms of romance. This means showing that life is messy but you can move past it and still thrive. However, it can also mean showing that people can be terrible when emotionally hurt, too. So get ready for a mixed bag!
Romance Anime With Breakups
My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun
While initially sparking interest by being a romance anime about gamers, My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun eventually grew past just appealing to gamer girls into being one of the better modern romance anime to come out in recent years.
My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun follows a college girl who is freshly broken up with by her cheating boyfriend. She has the very mature adult response to this by getting sloppy drunk with a handsome stranger/guild mate. After their embarrassing first meeting, they slowly grow closer and build a relationship based on understanding, trust, and communication.
My Lv999 Love for Yamada-kun emphasizes that some relationships just don’t work out because two people can feel entirely different ways about their relationship. However, breakups are also an opportunity to move forward into something better.
Scum’s Wish
Sometimes romance is just the worst thing you could possibly do to yourself. This is the feeling that Scum’s Wish excels at conveying by showing you the messy love lives of incredibly flawed people.
There is a very large love polygon going on in Scum’s Wish in that everyone loves someone else. It emphasizes this by following a main high school couple that only date because they can’t date the adults they have crushes on.
There are multiple breakups throughout the Scum’s Wish, and no one responds to it very well. You watch awful characters do awful things to each other that result in mostly pain – but also just a few bright hopeful romantic revelations and moments of personal growth as well.
Nana
No one writes messy romantic life stories quite like Ai Yazawa. Nana, Paradise Kiss, Neighborhood Story – all excellent romantic dramas. However, Nana, a story about two women named Nana navigating their new lives in Tokyo while living together in the same apartment, packs in the breakups by following two very different women.
Nana Osaki is a rocker who was in a very Sid and Nancy type of toxic relationship with a substance abuser that she broke off to focus on her rock career. Of course, toxic relationships also mean moving on and letting go is difficult at best.
Nana Komatsu, on the other hand, is a naive country girl looking for love in the big city. She finds it over and over again. Some of her love interests would be healthy and wholesome, but naive girls always pick the worst options.
My Stepmom’s Daughter is My Ex
My Stepmom’s Daughter is My Ex is one of those suspiciously named anime titles that makes you think it is going to be bad. Or rather, it invites you to think that it is meant to appeal to fans of a certain faux wincest fetish. However, My Stepmom’s Daughter is My Ex hides a surprising amount of depth under its provocative title.
While it becomes immediately apparent that the new step-siblings that used to date in middle school still have feelings for each other, there is a lot of animosity there too. In fact, much of the series is slowly drip-feeding you the miscommunication that ultimately led to their breakup and how the newly-forced communication of having to live together is putting some salve on that old wound.
Domestic Girlfriend
You know how I said My Stepmom’s Daughter is My Ex had unexpected depth despite sounding like a series meant to appeal to a step-sibling kink? Well, Domestic Girlfriend is that, but removes the depth and instead embraces the kink.
Domestic Girlfriend is about watching the frustrating tug-of-war between two sisters over their new stepbrother, a tediously standard love triangle protagonist with minimal actual personality.
He dates each sister at one point, despite one of them being his adult teacher and the other starting as a one-night stand before their parents marriage. However, each time he commits to a sister, you watch him break her heart as he decides he likes the other better.
In truth, Domestic Girlfriend is an excellent dumpster fire to watch as the ham-fisted romantic melodrama is amusing, but it isn’t a romance anime that tries to make your heart beat fast so much as it tries to make something throb in your pants.
Dahlia in Bloom
When looking for anime about moving on from a breakup, you think of messy modern-set drama. However, Dahlia in Bloom is something new done in a increasingly tired genre – isekai.
While you can find plenty of breakups if you are into villainess isekai anime, Dahlia in Bloom follows an office lady that, at her death, laments that she was never able to find something to be passionate about. She does find passion in her new fantasy life as an artificer – someone who makes magical devices and tools.
Now, it isn’t long before her father arranges a betrothal for her with his other apprentice – and her husband-to-be is everything you’d hate in a fiancee. He tells her to dress more modestly, dye her hair a plainer color, drink less in public, broadcasts his insecurity over her success as an artificer, and ultimately, cheats on her.
Dahlia in Bloom isn’t strictly a romance anime. It is an anime about learning to thrive as a person in all respects. She breaks up with her awful fiancee and dedicates herself to her work. As any romance junkie should come to expect, it isn’t long after that decision that she has a clandestine meeting with a man who just so happens to be a perfect potential life partner for her.
As Dahlia in Bloom is an isekai about personal growth, you won’t get as much in the way of truly swoon-worthy romantic moments, but it is probably the healthiest anime to watch if you were using anime about breakups to work through your own broken heart.
Skip Beat
What do you do after getting dumped hard? Make them regret it.
Skip Beat is an older shoujo romance that has a very “girl boss” approach to being dumped. “You’re plucky, you’re going to pick yourself up, and then you’re going to show them up.” That is the vibe you get as you watch a girl get into show business after being dumped by her now-famous boyfriend that she had been supporting.
Although, to be fair, there is no official breakup in the series as the pair were never actually dating. However, it still has that same powerful rejuvenating energy that you want from a post-breakup story.
Golden Time
Golden Time is a romance drama where they really internalized the drama that most modern romance stories have moved away from. It has everything – love triangles, parental issues, miscommunication, and it even dusts off the old amnesia trope as a testament to a bygone age where no romance anime could be just a pleasant love story.
Golden Time follows an amnesiac who is repeating his freshmen year in law school after losing his memories. He is immediately taken by the confident whirlwind of a woman that breaks up with a a boy he had just become friends with right in front of him.
Alongside being caught up in the chaos of their rapidly eroding relationship and his own blooming new feelings, you soon discover that there is another girl that he had feelings for tucked under his layer of memory loss.
While the sheer amount of character drama going on at any one time in Golden Time can be a bit much, it is an interesting story about how old feelings and new feelings intersect – and who gets hurt in the process.
School Days
School Days features a legendary reputation in the anime community for its ending, which is either delightful or horrific depending on who you ask.
However, while people remember the shock and the schlock, School Days is, in essence, a deconstruction of the harem genre. It takes many of the very common harem tropes, and then displays how those tropes, if they were used in real life, would lead to incredibly toxic relationships.
As the main character is dealing with multiple women on deck, he of course strings a number along in casual relationships and weeble-wobbles between the two girls in his primary love triangle. However, the breakups start to come into play at the end, for better or worse.
A Condition Called Love
While much of A Condition Called Love is about a newly blossoming relationship, it does start with a breakup. However, not for the main character.
Instead, in A Condition Called Love, you watch a girl inexperienced and uninterested in love watch a handsome boy from her school get broken up with publicly. After reaching out to him in his sadness, sparks fly between them.
While many consider A Condition Called Love to be a “fluffy romance,” it does feature a male lead who throws up more red flags than green ones in his behavior with his new girlfriend. Overly clingy, jealous, and possessive to an almost obnoxious degree, A Condition Called Love is a display that any personality is lovable by someone, somewhere. Although, it might be easier to just work through these issues first rather than to find someone color-blind to your brighter crimson red flags.
Rumbling Hearts
Similar to Golden Time, Rumbling Hearts goes heavy on the melodrama as you watch two girls and a guy figure out the math on their love triangle. However, no one really breaks up in the official sense – but boy is Rumbling Hearts a breakup romance anime in every way.
Rumbling Hearts follows the young love of a couple that is soon “broken up” by the girl going into a coma after the accident. During that time, he start’s dating another female friend, which becomes complicated when his first girlfriend wakes up and thinks they are still dating.
From there, you watch everyone be incredibly confused and emotional in a whirlwind of romantic drama. It gets to the point of toxicity that, even though the only true “break up” in most of the series is a coma, you wish the main couple would breakup as you watch an increasingly toxic relationship further unravel.
Love is Indivisible By Twins
Twins are usually the non-choices of the harem or just another kink. However, Love is Indivisible By Twins aims to tackle romance involving twins where the answer isn’t an immediate “we’ll just share him.”
You follow a set of twins who both fall in love with their male neighbor and childhood friend. However, the series starts with one twin, who had been dating him, breaking up with him because she can no longer live with the guilt of feeling like she stole him from her twin sister that loved him first.
As it turns out, breaking up with someone out of guilt over someone else does not mean you stop loving them. When the boy and the other twin start dating, feelings become increasingly more complicated to the point where you want everyone involved to start looking elsewhere for romantic partners because the situation has become so scuffed.
Do you have more romance anime about breakups? Let fans know in the comments section below.
