Short, Sweet, and (not so) Simple | I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up

I Married My Best Friend To Shut My Parents Up, is a girls love manga that was personally recommended by my friend who is a self proclaimed GL connoisseur. This 158 page manga is super short so you can probably get through it in an hour or so. It tells a story about a woman who is being badgered by her parents to find a suitable husband and settle down. The only problem is that she does not want this. So, in order to get her parents to back off, she “marries” her best friend.

What I expected to see going into this read was two best friends who decide to marry in order to make a stand against one set of parents. I assumed both were gay characters who decide to make a stand and live their lives the way they would want, but instead, the story follows one straight girl and one openly gay girl who decide to enter into a fake marriage to stop the constant questioning. So, this major adjustment to expectations hit me pretty hard and maybe I should have just read the blurb before starting the book…

If you are looking for a super short, cute, domestic fluff piece to curl up with, I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up is a good choice to pick up.

Following the development of a more platonic leaning relationship of two adult characters without any misunderstandings or overthought feelings is a nice change of pace from a lot of younger cast romances you might come across.

One of the things that I love is that these characters are adults. This just opens up a lot more possibilities compared to high school settings where kids are limited to school, clubs, after school jobs and so forth. Having a job and then the ability to just go home allows us to see what the two are like separate and together.

Hana is an illustrator who has had crush on Machi for years, and after offering herself as a fake wife, moves in with Machi in order to secure their marriage license. She has this open and free aura about her, she will say what she wants and she will go after what she seeks, like telling a socially dense Machi that she likes her right to her face.

Machi is a loner who seems to hate people because of the pressure of her mother to be the perfect daughter. She never really thinks about what she herself wants to do, she has just been instilled with this urge to not fuck up her life and avoid making her parents look down on her at all costs.

After the two move in together, Hana takes over the homemaking, she keeps the house clean, cooks dinner, and begs to shower with Machi. She wants this fake marriage to be real and tries, ever so subtly, to get Machi to fall for her.

One of my favorite things about this manga is seeing Machi undergo character development in such a short amount of time and it seems. Living with someone who is so upfront about things pushes Machi to stand up for herself and try to live the life SHE wants to live instead of the one she thinks is safe. She goes forward and asks about a place of a work project that a week prior, she was fine being replaced on a week before. She FINALLY gets the courage to stand up against her mother after barging into her home and shaming her and Hana for their relationship. Before Hana, there was no way that she would push herself like this. It is also mentioned that even her coworkers see that Machi is happier after living with Hana, Hana herself obviously notices these changes and is thrilled, saying it makes her love grow even stronger.

The only section that threw me when reading was the fourth section, Anaerobic Love, because it completely changed the perspective of the story. We get a glimpse of the relationship back during their school days. It seems like such a hard turn and I would have preferred to see the timeline stay focused around Hana and Machi as adults traversing this new stage of whatever type of relationship that they have now. I wanted to see more development, romantic or not, between the two, even just seeing a more in-depth change within the friendship would have been nice.

I think the main thing bringing this manga down is the fact that we don’t get to see a whole lot of these two characters. I want to see more, I want more about how they came to this agreement, I want to know how the first week of living together went, how were they feeling when they got their license. I think adding things like that, things that could make the reader feel like they know these characters would have me rate this higher.