Title: 付き合ってあげてもいいかな Tsukiatte Agetemo Ii kana
Creator: たみふる Tamifull
Books: 11 volumes so far, Jan '19 - ongoing, Ura Sunday Joshi-bu, Shogakukan
https://urasunday.com/title/603
Published by Viz Media in English as How Do We Relationship?
One of the longest running GL manga. It begins with Saeko and Miwa starting university, becoming friends, joining a band together, coming out each other as lesbians and trying to start a relationship. The series is largely concerned with the difficulties of making relationships work.
The characters and premise originated in doujinshi. The series does a good job of weaving together the ideas from those doujinshi in a way that fleshes out the characters so it makes sense that they arrived where they do, while the freedom of the fragmentary nature of the doujinshi probably contributed to the series taking an interesting direction that's a bit of a gamble.
One of the doujinshi was an adult one about Miwa and Saeko having sex after having broken up. The series itself isn't adult rated, so it's less explicit than that doujinshi, but sex is still a prominent part of the series, with the characters having to navigate sexual compatibility, or being stressed about the lack of it, playing a key role in how the relationships unfold.
Sex isn't the only source of trouble. Even with both parties genuinely caring about their partner and wanting to make each other happy, there's plenty of ways to hurt each other. Any romantic relationship involves a degree of compromise and adapting to what the other person wants, but there isn't necessarily going to be a sustainable middle ground. There's various instances of a character trying to do something for the sake of their lover only for that to ultimately be unwelcome and make things worse. There are some unpleasant characters on the periphery, such as glimpsed in backstory, but for the most part it's a series where the emotional conflict exists without villains, but nonetheless manages to be quite intense.
Miwa and Saeko being in their university light music society serves to keep the scope of the university setting manageable, justifying how most of the recurring characters are acquainted. The bands and their gigs play a role in the story, but they're clearly less of a priority than in Whisper Me a Love Song, which uses them as key set pieces to build arcs toward. For that matter, this series is quite loosely structured, without clear arcs, but the concept has allowed to it generally maintain a sense of it knowing where it's headed over the years it's been going.
Despite the two main characters being lesbians, with that being central to premise and moderately important in the ongoing themes of the story, words such as lesbian, homosexual or bi are avoided. Tamifull tweeted a couple of years after the series started about this being a conscious decision and Inui Ayu wrote a lengthy blog post defending it. It's a widespread norm in yuri manga, so it was interesting to see a mangaka address it. Apparently the impetus is a concern about the terms being othering, both in that the part of the audience that's straight may feel less like they're supposed to relate to the characters, but also that there's people who don't like being categorized with labels.
