This review contains some spoilers. Anything major is spoiler marked.

From Tamiki Wakaki, the mangaka behind The World God Only Knows, Kekkon Surutte tells the story of Rika Honjouji and Takuya Oohara, two employees of a travel agency. When the agency announces they'll be sending a single employee to a new branch in Russia at the end of the year, the pair decide to fake a marriage to avoid having to leave behind their normal lives. The series follows them both romantically and how they and everyone around them change over time.

The series is honestly incredible. In a sea of romcoms and contrived drama, Kekkon Surutte is more experimental feeling. Rather than focusing on laughs or even the romance, the series feels more like it's simply using real-world issues such as remarriage, the influence of family on life decisions, growth vs tradition, and confronting your own character flaws to let the characters move around and grow. It feels less like the mangaka was writing out bits of the story and more like they just wanted to see how the characters would interact, and combined with the focus on real-world issues, the cast becomes beautifully, sometimes painfully human and extremely endearing.

As a whole, the cast is well established. Right off the bat, the series is able to define the main couple, as well as their flaws without leaning into the extreme, unrealistic tropes that many romcoms fall into. Even side characters have strong personalities for the most part, and for those that the series focuses on, their problems, flaws, and how they overcome them feel just as fleshed out as the main cast. Side cast spoilers ahead:

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There's Gonda, actively trying to move forward with his life through marriage, Nao, trying to find tangible monetary success while staying true to her art, and the dynamic between George and Shinshi, the former moving the latter through dealing with a broken family.

They're all too human, and the result is realistic characters and character dynamics. Thanks to that, the series is able to tackle emotional topics exceedingly well, often successfully swinging from humorous to heartbreaking to bittersweet in just a few pages, and consistently hits emotional points in a stronger way than pretty much anything else I've ever read. The cast and their problems don't feel like ink on a page, they truly just feel human.

The series' approach to its cast also serves as a showcase of generativity vs. stagnation- most of the cast's problems are tied up in that choice between moving forward or the "safety" the comes from not changing, and the series is able to capture the feeling of choosing to grow or being forced to grow within it exceedingly well. It's not necessarily uncommon for manga these days to give characters more realistic flaws, especially series that present a simpler or more realistic story, but to see characters overcome their flaws naturally over time- thanks to characters finding reasons to want to overcome them- is less common.

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Be it the main couple trying to understand their relationship and the social pressures- cohabitation, sex, marriage- that come with it or Gonda's confronting his own failures to try and become better for Kaori, the series is more than able to portray the development in ways that feel natural for the character.

There are points where it becomes a slower burn thanks to taking its time to develop and grow the characters, but the characters really do develop well and it's more than worth the journey.

The series is also able to portray different kinds of "family" and their relationships in a way that ties into the generativity vs stagnation theme, be it families falling apart or coming back together, single parent households, or through expectations of a child's duty to the family. It's hard to get into without spoilers, but it feels like the author is more cynical or less traditionalist than many mangaka, with their approach to the ideas of children developing on their own for their own sake rather than to meet the expectation of the family. Again, it all ties into the idea of moving forward-

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with no more literal an example than granny Oohara no longer being able to physically move forward and the expectation of the next generation doing so instead

The approach allows the series to continually build upon character relationships through family.

In short, the series' portrayal of characters and their relationships is incredible, and it allows the series to break free from just doing typical romcom stuff and deliver a more grounded and endearing experience.

The art is also pretty nice, I like the overall style and many of the backgrounds and landscapes are great. Nothing too crazy, but the style works well with the series.

That said, the series does have some flaws. I mentioned the feeling of it being more experimental earlier, and there's an author note confirming that it was a new direction for them early on. In the first "act" of the story it does feel like the mangaka's still getting used to the direction of the story, with some odd pacing decisions and half-assed romcom "Voila! Weird situation, blush and deal with it!" shenanigans, but over time it improves noticeably.
There's also a subplot with the phone calls that's abruptly wrapped up in the span of like a page that I felt was pretty poorly concluded given its initial impact on the story, but again it's sort of tied into the feeling of experimentality that the series has early on. Some of the side plots are also left only partly finished. Given how short the series is, the amount of fleshing out it does for the cast is impressive, but it could still use a short, couple volume epilogue to finish

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the main couple's, Gonda's and Shinshi's approaches to marriage after the events of the story.

It doesn't ruin the series or anything, but considering how invested the series gets you in each character's development seeing some great stories left dangling is a bit of a letdown.

Overall- incredible series. It's a bit experimental but pulls off an emotional roller coaster with a realistic, endearing cast and does a great job weaving in its themes alongside more grounded drama to take a rather different direction than most romcoms. Very well done, and I hope more romcoms go in a similar direction in the future.