Crunchy Roll - What to Watch

I am a manga man, I have read countless series but recently at the HyperJapan event I realised I am missing out on quite a few decent Animes that are not on both mediums, or where the Manga is a poor alternative (Sword Art Online). So, I have signed up to Crunchyrolls free trial to test the service / choice.

I have previously watched Chobits and Serial Experiment Lain, and a few others that I forget names of (People with an insatiable need to do something to themselves after using "Abilities", like smoking or breaking a finger?) and quite liked the short nature, but if I am replacing some Manga time, a good long series that keeps me engaged would be good.

Can anyone recommend other must watch series' / shorts that are not already Manga or are better than the Manga version?
And also another recommendation for a new to anime "girlfriend friendly" series?

Cheers,

Whilst not an avid Manga/Anime fan (we're both watching Naruto and I've watch SoA), we both really loved Steins;Gate. Took a few episodes to understand what was going on, but we were both gripped from the start and it was one heck of a roller-coaster.

We started a couple of others on Netflix but they were a bit heavy for the other half (Attack on Titan and Psycho Pass). We're going to be through another series of Naruto shortly so will be looking to pick something else up soon!

Assuming you mean manga specifically and not the novels, I'm watching "Shinsekai Yori" currently and it's great. The manga of it is apparently just a fan service spin off, but the anime is really interesting so far for me. Would highly recommend. I believe it should be available on Crunchyroll, as when I was downloading it HorribleSubs had it and they just rip Crunchyroll's subs.

Other than that, I don't really pay attention to manga at all, I read some to finish off Full Metal Panic and I want to get round to reading Btooom eventually but for the most part I stick to just watching the anime so can't really offer much of an opinion. I could list off some of the anime I particularly liked but the accepted rule seems to be that the manga tends to be better than the anime, as long as the manga is actually sticking to the source unlike Shinsekai, or if theres no manga at all.

Clannad is another great anime which the manga is apparently supbar on, but you'll need a little patience to get past the school setting of it unless thats your thing. Heck you might be able to count it as girlfriend friendly, but again that will come down to patience with the school setting. Make sure you also watch Clannad: After Story if you watch Clannad, that's when it really gets good.

There's also Evangelion which is highly regarded as a fairly long, very thoughtful anime. It requires a lot of piecing together though so if you have no real interest in it, that will only be made worse when it expects you to link different events together when actually you werent paying attention at all, as happened with me. For all intents and purposes it's supposed to be great, but I simply couldn't get into it.