Our Dating Story: The Inexperienced Me and the Experienced You almost feels like the polar opposite of Girlfriend, Girlfriend. While Girlfriend, Girlfriend is aggressively polyamorous with some hints at bisexuality, Our Dating Story is very monogamous and heterosexual. The other series is very horny, much more horny than the first season, while Our Dating Story is fairly chaste (while being aware of sex).

Our Dating Story follows Ry?to Kashima, a nerdy high school boy who, after losing a bet, confesses his feelings to a Gal he has a crush on, Runa Shirakawa, who has recently broken up with her boyfriend. When she takes him home on the first date for sex, his asking her about this leads to her revealing that she felt obligated to do so specifically because of pressure from the past guys she dated. When he says he’d prefer to have sex with her when she wants to have sex with him, this leads to a more long-term relationship.

If you think “this sounds kinda patriarchal”, it kinda is – Rena’s feelings about commitment and willingness to have sex with people before she’s ready to, throughout the series, end up getting tied to anxiety due from her parents’ divorce. While that can certainly be a real-world issue, it feels reductive. While the two generally stay a couple for the whole series, their relationship never really steps into the physical again. I do wish that, if not the last episode of the series than the penultimate episode of the series they had finally taken that step, to then get into the conversation of “Our relationship has become physical now, so now what?”

This reductiveness was particularly head-scratching considering how much the rest of the series does try to paint adult problems as being more complicated than a dramatic manga solution – one episode has Rena and her fraternal twin sister attempt to do a “Parent Trap” style plan to get their parents back together, only for things to fall apart because their parents just aren’t interested in getting back together, and perhaps they didn’t understand that people sometimes have irreconcilable differences.

I even appreciated the fact that the series was willing to consider the idea that sometimes imposter syndrome can harm relationships, just as much as it can harm someone in the workplace – someone feeling that they’re too good or too different than someone else leading them to overthink how they feel about each other and second-guess the relationship. I’m glad that the series, rather than being a romanticized take on, well, romance – like with Tonikawa – was willing to have relationship difficulties, but have those be things that can be reconciled (with additional awareness that isn’t always the case).

In all, Our Dating Story was an interesting romantic dramedy – and one that while having younger characters than something like Rent-A-Girlfriend, felt a little more mature.

Our Dating Story is available for streaming on Crunchyroll.

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