Content note: This post discusses war, grief, manipulation, sexual assault, intimate-partner abuse, and unhealthy relationships.

Eleven years ago today, I started dating the man who is now my husband. By then, we had already been friends for nearly six years, and we were both emerging from some pretty… interesting relationships.

We first met through a mutual friend while attending an anime convention. He was cosplaying Demyx from Kingdom Hearts, and I was cosplaying Reno from Final Fantasy VII. I like to say that I was attracted to him the moment I saw him looming in our friend’s kitchen.

The reality was slightly less romantic at first.

I had just woken up and was getting ready for the convention when I walked into the kitchen and discovered a very tall teenage boy leaning against the refrigerator. I had not been warned that there was a stranger in the house, so attraction came immediately after the initial panic.

Once I recovered, we spent nearly the entire convention together. We became friends almost immediately.

It took us years to start dating because the timing was never quite right. One or both of us always seemed to be with someone else. Then, in 2015, it simply happened. Friendship became something more, and we decided to see where it would take us.

Only four months later, in November 2015, he moved four hours away to Kansas. We spent the next year in a long-distance relationship before I joined him in November 2016.

After nine years together, we became engaged in November 2024. We married one month later, in December 2024.

Our relationship has survived distance, major moves, changing circumstances, difficult periods, and the many different versions of ourselves we have become along the way. It began with two teenagers in cosplay spending a day together at an anime convention. More than a decade later, that friendship remains the foundation of our marriage.

So, in honor of our eleventh anniversary, I wanted to look at several relationships from anime, manga, and video games that we both find compelling.

Some represent trust, partnership, and the ability to grow together. Others are complicated by war, grief, manipulation, possessiveness, guilt, or unequal power. Liking a fictional relationship does not necessarily mean believing it is healthy or wanting to imitate it. Sometimes the most compelling relationships are the ones that help us recognize the difference between loving someone and loving them well.

These are the stories that have stayed with us—and what they reveal about love, loyalty, survival, and the difficult work of choosing another person.

Love Is More Than a Feeling

Popular stories often teach us to recognize love through intensity.

Two characters sacrifice themselves for each other, survive impossible circumstances, or insist that no one else could ever understand them. Suffering becomes evidence of devotion. Jealousy is interpreted as passion. Possessiveness becomes protection. Remaining together, regardless of what happens inside the relationship, is treated as proof that the relationship was meant to be.

But duration alone does not make a relationship healthy. Neither does desire.

In All About Love, bell hooks argues that love should be understood as a practice involving care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, and honest communication—not merely as a powerful feeling (hooks 5). That distinction matters when examining fictional relationships because characters can genuinely care about one another while still behaving selfishly, dishonestly, or violently.

The relationships on this list are not interchangeable. Some are romantic partnerships. One is a damaged mentor-and-protégé bond rather than a romance. Some demonstrate growth, while others reveal the ways that love can become entangled with manipulation and abuse.

Together, however, they ask the same question:

What does it mean to choose another person without possessing them, using them, or asking them to disappear inside the relationship?

Murrue Ramius and Mu La Flaga: Love After Survival

In a series dominated by teenage soldiers, political dynasties, genetic conflict, and catastrophic wars, Murrue Ramius and Mu La Flaga offer something unusual: an adult relationship built between two people carrying responsibilities larger than themselves.

Murrue becomes captain of the Archangel through circumstance rather than ambition. She is forced to command a ship filled with frightened civilians, inexperienced soldiers, and teenagers who should never have been placed on a battlefield. Every decision she makes can determine whether hundreds of people live or die.

Mu understands some of that burden. He has more combat experience than most of the crew, but he never requires Murrue to surrender her authority to make him comfortable. He advises her, challenges her when necessary, and uses humor to ease the pressure surrounding them. Their affection grows alongside their professional trust rather than replacing it.

That distinction is important. Murrue does not have to become less competent to become lovable. Mu is not threatened by her authority, and his role in her life is not to take command away from her. He gives her somewhere to place a small portion of the burden.

Their relationship is also shaped by the instability of war. There is never a guarantee that either of them will return from a battle. At the Second Battle of Jachin Due, Mu intercepts the Dominion’s positron attack to protect the Archangel. Murrue survives, but she believes she has lost him (Mobile Suit Gundam SEED).

His eventual return in Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny does not erase that grief. The man who returns has Mu’s face and voice, but not his memories. As Neo Roanoke, he has been placed in command of Phantom Pain and participates in the same machinery of war that Mu once opposed.

Murrue recognizes him, but recognition does not immediately restore him.

She cannot love him back into becoming the person he was. She can offer him safety, confront him with the possibility of his former identity, and give him the freedom to make a choice. When he returns to defend the Archangel, and later recovers his memories while shielding it from another devastating attack, his return matters because it becomes more than biological destiny. He chooses the people who once knew him, even before he fully understands why (Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny).

Their story could easily have reduced love to mystical recognition: Murrue knows Mu because true love supposedly transcends memory. Instead, their relationship also depends on trust, freedom, and renewed action.

Murrue recognizes Mu, but she does not own him. Mu returns to her, but he must still choose what kind of man he intends to be.

By Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Freedom, they have survived two wars, death, memory loss, political upheaval, and the destruction of almost every place they once considered safe. Their relationship endures not because it has remained untouched, but because they repeatedly find their way back to one another.

Love, in their story, means being recognized after the world has tried to erase you.

Kira, Flay, and Lacus: Being Needed Versus Being Known

Kira Yamato’s relationships with Flay Allster and Lacus Clyne demonstrate two profoundly different forms of intimacy.

It is tempting to describe the comparison as a simple contrast between the wrong woman and the right woman. That interpretation, however, reduces both Flay and Lacus to instruments in Kira’s development. It also ignores the political violence shaping all three of them.

Flay and Kira’s relationship begins in terror.

Kira is a Coordinator fighting beside Naturals who do not entirely trust him. He is expected to protect his friends by killing people who share his genetics, including soldiers connected to his childhood best friend. He is isolated, traumatized, and increasingly convinced that his only value lies in his ability to pilot the Strike.

Flay is also traumatized. She watches her father die during a ZAFT attack and directs her grief toward Coordinators as a group. Because Kira is both a Coordinator and emotionally attached to her, she realizes that she can use his feelings to keep him fighting.

She offers him affection and sexual intimacy while privately intending to transform him into a weapon against ZAFT. She tells Kira what he desperately wants to hear: that she needs him.

But she does not initially need Kira as a whole person. She needs his power.

Their relationship is exploitative, but Flay should not be flattened into an uncomplicated villain. She is a frightened teenager attempting to recover a sense of control after an unbearable loss. Her grief explains why she reaches for manipulation; it does not make that manipulation harmless.

As the war continues, Flay’s feelings become more complicated. The role she has created becomes harder to separate from genuine attachment. She begins to understand what she has done, but the war denies her the opportunity to complete that reckoning. Her attempt to return to Kira and communicate her remorse ends with her death (Mobile Suit Gundam SEED).

Their relationship is tragic because there were real feelings inside it. Those feelings simply could not transform a relationship founded on fear, prejudice, dependency, and manipulation into something safe.

Lacus offers Kira something different.

Their earliest interactions are shaped by political identity. Lacus is the daughter of PLANT Supreme Council Chairman Siegel Clyne and the fiancée of Athrun Zala. She is already a symbol before Kira learns who she is. Yet their initial connection forms when both are temporarily removed from those prescribed roles.

Kira does not treat her as an enemy hostage, and Lacus does not treat him as a useful Coordinator. Their bond begins with recognition.

That does not mean Lacus exists outside the machinery of war. She eventually gives Kira the Freedom Gundam, one of the most powerful weapons in the Cosmic Era. The gift cannot be separated from military power. However, Lacus does not tell Kira that his worth depends on how many enemies he can destroy. She asks him to decide what he wants to protect and gives him the means to act on that decision.

Flay attempts to determine what Kira must become. Lacus creates room for Kira to choose.

Their relationship develops through shared convictions, quiet domestic periods, political resistance, and repeated separation. Lacus does not need Kira to be the invincible Ultimate Coordinator. She wants the person who exists beneath that designation.

Even so, Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Freedom refuses to portray their relationship as effortless. Kira internalizes responsibility for maintaining peace and begins shutting Lacus out. He believes he must solve every crisis himself so that she and everyone else will no longer have to suffer. His self-sacrifice becomes another form of isolation.

Lacus, meanwhile, faces a system insisting that genetics should determine whom she loves. The revelation surrounding the Accords attempts to turn romance into biological destiny: she has supposedly been created for Orphee Lam Tao, while Kira is an improper choice.

Her rejection of that logic is both romantic and political. Lacus chooses Kira because he is Kira—not because a genetic program has declared them compatible (Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Freedom).

That is the central difference between Kira’s relationships.

Flay initially makes Kira feel valuable because he can fight for her. Lacus attempts to remind him that he possesses value even when he is not saving the world.

Kira and Lacus are not perfect communicators, and their tendency to carry impossible burdens independently nearly damages their relationship. What allows them to continue is not perfection. It is their eventual willingness to reject the roles other people have created for them and choose one another with greater honesty.

Garrett and Erin: Protection Without Trust

Garrett and Erin are not a romantic couple in Thief (2014). Their canon relationship is closer to that of a mentor and apprentice, with elements of surrogate family.

They belong in this discussion because romantic love is not the only relationship that teaches us how to care for another person. Our romantic relationships are also shaped by what we learned through friendship, family, mentorship, and loss.

Garrett cares about Erin, but he does not trust her judgment.

During the opening mission at Northcrest Manor, Erin’s recklessness and willingness to kill create a conflict between them. Garrett takes her Claw because he believes he must stop her before she causes more harm. He may be correct about the danger, but he still makes the decision for her.

Erin experiences his intervention as condescension and betrayal. Their argument ends with her falling through the manor’s skylight and into Northcrest’s ritual. Garrett awakens a year later to discover that Erin has disappeared and the City is being consumed by the Gloom (Thief).

Much of the game is driven by Garrett’s guilt. He searches for Erin because he cares about her, but also because saving her might allow him to correct his own failure. His love for her becomes entangled with his need to undo the past.

Garrett’s protectiveness is therefore complicated. He sees danger clearly, but he struggles to understand that protecting someone cannot mean permanently denying their agency. Erin, meanwhile, interprets independence as never accepting restraint, even when her actions endanger herself and others.

At the game’s conclusion, Garrett throws Erin’s Claw after her as she falls. The object he once took from her becomes the means through which she can save herself. The final wet footprints and the Claw embedded nearby suggest that Erin survived, but she disappears before Garrett awakens (Thief).

He does not receive a grateful reunion. Erin does not return so that his guilt can be neatly absolved.

Their story suggests that care without trust easily becomes control. Wanting to save someone is not the same as listening to them, and guilt is not the same as accountability.

That lesson applies to romance as much as it applies to mentorship. Loving someone does not grant us the authority to control their life. Protection must leave room for the other person to remain a person.

Geralt and Triss: Love After Memory Returns

Any discussion of Geralt of Rivia and Triss Merigold requires acknowledging that The Witcher does not offer a single uncomplicated romantic canon.

In Andrzej Sapkowski’s books, Yennefer is the central love of Geralt’s life. In CD Projekt Red’s games, however, Geralt’s romantic future becomes partly dependent on the player. This section focuses primarily on the game continuity, where Triss can become Geralt’s chosen partner.

Geralt and Triss begin the games with an ethical problem at the center of their relationship: Geralt has lost his memory.

Triss knows portions of the history Geralt cannot remember, including his relationship with Yennefer. Although her feelings for him are real, she benefits from his inability to make a fully informed comparison between his present and his past.

The problem is not that Geralt feels nothing for Triss. It is that he makes early choices without access to essential parts of his own life.

Memory does not merely provide facts. It provides context. Without it, Geralt cannot completely understand who Triss was to him, who Yennefer was to him, or what unresolved promises and betrayals existed before the games began.

By The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Geralt has recovered his memory. Triss can no longer be his partner simply because she is the woman standing beside the version of him who does not remember anyone else.

He must choose her again.

That makes the quest “Now or Never” appropriately named. Triss is preparing to lead persecuted mages out of Novigrad. She has responsibilities and a future that do not depend upon Geralt. If he wants her to remain part of his life, he must say so openly. If he tells her that he loves her—and does not simultaneously pursue Yennefer—the game allows their relationship to continue.

In one possible conclusion, Triss becomes an adviser in Kovir while Geralt takes contracts more selectively. Their future is not built around one person abandoning every ambition for the other. It leaves room for Triss’s political work and Geralt’s identity as a witcher (The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt).

Choosing Triss does not erase the uncomfortable foundation of their earlier relationship. It does, however, transform the meaning of the later choice.

Geralt is no longer choosing her because he has forgotten his past. He is choosing her after remembering it.

That is part of what makes romance in a role-playing game so interesting. The player participates in defining what Geralt values. The relationship becomes a collaboration between the written character, the available narrative, and the person holding the controller.

For players who choose Triss, their relationship can represent a second choice made with fuller knowledge. Love is not sustained by keeping Geralt separated from his former self. It must survive the return of that self.

A relationship should not require us to remain incomplete in order to preserve it.

Vegeta and Bulma: Change Must Become Action

Vegeta and Bulma are one of the strangest successful couples in shōnen anime.

Their courtship happens largely outside the central narrative. One moment Vegeta is a genocidal Saiyan prince obsessed with defeating Goku; later, Future Trunks reveals that Vegeta and Bulma will become his parents.

On paper, the pairing sounds absurd.

In practice, it works because Bulma and Vegeta are more alike than they initially appear. Both are proud, demanding, brilliant, stubborn, and accustomed to occupying whatever space they enter. Bulma is not intimidated by Vegeta’s title or temper. Vegeta cannot impress her simply by announcing that he is the prince of all Saiyans.

Bulma also gives Vegeta something he has never possessed: an ordinary place to return to.

Capsule Corporation provides him with shelter, technology, food, a gravity chamber, and eventually a family. Bulma opens that life to him, but she cannot make him participate in it. Vegeta must decide whether he will remain a permanent visitor or become part of the household.

His development is painfully slow.

When Future Trunks is killed by Cell, Vegeta attacks Cell despite knowing that he is outmatched. During the Majin Buu arc, he regresses, allowing Babidi to influence him because he wants to recover the cruelty and singular ambition he believes domestic life has taken from him. His subsequent sacrifice matters because he finally acknowledges what he is trying to protect: Bulma, Trunks, and even Goku (Dragon Ball Z).

But dramatic sacrifice is not the same as sustained partnership.

Vegeta’s later growth becomes more convincing when it appears through smaller decisions. In Dragon Ball Super, he participates more actively in family life, travels with Bulma and Trunks, reacts furiously when Beerus strikes Bulma, and refuses to leave for the Tournament of Power while Bulma is preparing to give birth to Bulla.

The last of these may be less spectacular than attacking a god, but it demonstrates something more important: Vegeta is learning to be present before a catastrophe forces him to prove that he cares.

Bulma does not reform Vegeta through patience or romantic devotion. Vegeta changes because he repeatedly confronts the inadequacy of the person he used to be. His family gives that change a direction, but he must perform the work himself.

It is also important not to romanticize the burden placed on Bulma. She absorbs years of Vegeta’s absence, obsession, hostility, and poor communication. Because the standard for Vegeta begins so low, relatively ordinary acts of care can receive enormous praise.

Growth deserves recognition, but it does not turn every earlier failure into an acceptable step in a romantic journey.

What makes Vegeta and Bulma compelling is not the claim that love excuses who Vegeta was. It is the possibility that someone capable of terrible harm can choose to become more accountable—and that such change must eventually appear in how he treats the people closest to him.

Love may offer a reason to change. It cannot perform that change for us.

Arashi and Miwako: When History Is Mistaken for Safety

Arashi Nagase and Miwako Sakurada initially appear to represent the comfort of childhood love.

They share years of history, mutual friends, and an attachment formed before the events of Paradise Kiss. Miwako’s softness appears to balance Arashi’s anger, while Arashi’s protectiveness can initially be mistaken for devotion.

Their relationship, however, exposes the danger of treating possessiveness as evidence of love.

Arashi is intensely jealous of Miwako’s friendship with Hiroyuki. His insecurity contributes to the separation between them, depriving Miwako of an important friendship because Arashi cannot tolerate a relationship he does not control.

That alone would make their romance unhealthy. The manga goes further.

Arashi admits that he forced himself on Miwako. Whatever affection exists between them, the act is rape. Miwako’s continued love for him does not create retroactive consent, and Arashi’s guilt does not undo the violence (Yazawa).

The fact that they remain together, marry, and have a child does not transform the assault into a difficult stage that their relationship successfully overcame.

This is where Paradise Kiss becomes especially uncomfortable. Ai Yazawa often writes relationships in which sincere love exists alongside manipulation, dependency, cruelty, and harm. Her characters do not always leave simply because a reader can recognize that leaving might be safer.

That reflects a painful reality: people can love those who hurt them. Victims do not always stop caring about abusive partners, and abusive people are not violent every moment of every day. Tenderness can exist within an abusive relationship without making the abuse less real.

However, realism does not place the narrative beyond criticism. Arashi faces limited consequences, and Miwako’s future with him can appear to reassure readers that their love was ultimately strong enough to survive what happened.

Survival is not the same as healing.

Arashi and Miwako belong in this anniversary reflection precisely because they draw such a firm line between attachment and loving conduct. Arashi may feel love for Miwako, but rape, isolation, intimidation, and control are not loving acts.

Their shared history does not guarantee safety. Their marriage does not prove that the relationship became healthy. Miwako’s forgiveness does not require the audience to forgive him.

Love cannot be measured solely by how long two people remain together. Sometimes staying reveals commitment. Sometimes it reveals how difficult it has become for one person to imagine a life outside the relationship.

The difference can be found in consent, respect, freedom, and accountability.

Eleven Years of Choosing Each Other

None of these relationships perfectly represents my husband and me.

Our marriage has involved considerably fewer mobile suits, magical stones, genocidal Saiyans, monster contracts, and fashion-school disasters. I consider that a success.

What these stories share with our relationship is time.

Time changes the meaning of love. It allows two people to know versions of one another that no longer exist. It carries a relationship through distance, moves, losses, mistakes, new ambitions, and changing ideas about the future.

Murrue and Mu demonstrate the importance of recognizing someone after trauma has disrupted their sense of identity.

Kira’s relationships with Flay and Lacus reveal the difference between being valued for what we can provide and being known as a complete person.

Garrett and Erin show that protectiveness without trust can become control.

Geralt and Triss ask whether love can be chosen honestly after memory and context have returned.

Vegeta and Bulma demonstrate that love may inspire growth, but growth must eventually become action.

Arashi and Miwako remind us that neither history nor devotion can excuse abuse.

Eleven years has taught me that love is not proven by the amount of pain two people can endure together. It is not measured solely by grand gestures, dramatic sacrifices, or the number of years that have passed.

Love is found in the way people treat one another while those years are passing.

It is the ability to change without demanding that the other person remain frozen in the version we first met. It is honest communication when silence would be easier. It is accountability without humiliation, commitment without possession, and closeness that does not require either person to surrender their independence.

Our relationship did not begin when we started dating. Its foundation had already been built during nearly six years of friendship. Dating changed the form of that bond, but it did not erase what came before it.

Then came long distance. Kansas. Moving. Engagement. Marriage.

Each stage asked us to choose one another in a different way.

Marriage was not the conclusion of our story. It was not the final scene confirming that everything before it had been leading toward an inevitable ending. It was another decision made after years of already building a life together.

Fiction loves destiny. It loves soulmates, dramatic reunions, impossible sacrifices, and relationships powerful enough to survive death itself.

Real love is often much quieter.

Sometimes it is simply two people who met as teenagers, became friends, survived terrible relationships and questionable cosplay choices, spent a year four hours apart, and continued choosing each other until “my friend from the anime convention” became “my husband.”

Every day, we choose each other. I can’t think of a better man to call my husband.

Works Cited

CD Projekt Red. The Witcher. Atari, 2007.

CD Projekt Red. The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. CD Projekt, 2011.

CD Projekt Red. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. CD Projekt, 2015.

hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions. William Morrow, 2000.

Mobile Suit Gundam SEED. Directed by Mitsuo Fukuda, Sunrise, 2002–2003.

Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny. Directed by Mitsuo Fukuda, Sunrise, 2004–2005.

Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Freedom. Directed by Mitsuo Fukuda, Bandai Namco Filmworks, 2024.

Dragon Ball Z. Directed by Daisuke Nishio et al., Toei Animation, 1989–1996.

Dragon Ball Super. Directed by Kimitoshi Chioka et al., Toei Animation, 2015–2018.

Thief. Eidos-Montréal, Square Enix, 2014.

Yazawa, Ai. Paradise Kiss: 20th Anniversary Edition. Vertical Comics, 2019.