Consider 2006's The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. It uses time travel not as an escape or an afterthought, but as a way of underscoring the pinning of love and how obdurate such feelings can be; it uses time travel as a means to emphasise, through repetition, how even the most fervent attempts to undo time cannot undo hearts. Love, it decides, is inevitable—just a matter of time.
The two anime covered this time as we embrace the shows from 2007 have no scientific or fantastic aspirations, yet in themselves do contain that dimensionality with their nuanced take on a subject well explored. It's unavoidable, after all, that the sum of one's here and now is but the result of every year, every day, every second that we've lived, and it's this that we bring to each relationship, new or old.
Love is like time travel in that regard. Romance stories in such a vein take the long route, an introspective that starts then and ends now; as much as it is about the feelings and hopes and dreams that two individuals bring together, it's also the way in which so many of us are shaped by what we've gone through and those we've loved, and how that affects those we're now in love with.
