HIMYM’s Mixed Messages

What were the good, bad, and ugly takeaways of How I Met Your Mother? Almost a decade after its series finale, the series is still very popular— its spinoff How I Met Your Father was recently renewed for a second season. And while How I Met Your Father has tried to distance itself from the original series in some ways – like avoiding the problematic misogyny of Barney and Ted. It mostly tries to copy the first show’s formula, highly aware of the show’s enduring resonance. So it’s worth asking: what are we still holding onto from the original show, and what are we trying to let go of? Deep down, lots of us still crave the tight-knit, sitcom friend circle, and as cheesy as it sounds, lots of us still believe in true love. Still, while Ted’s pursuit of true love was often warm and appealing, the journey also included plenty of bad behavior and perfect examples of what not to do in dating and relationships. Let’s dig into the meaningful messages and toxic takeaways of How I Met Your Mother.

Appreciating The Passage of Time

Ted’s quest to meet the mother of his children takes nine whole seasons. Over the course of the series, he and the other characters grow up—Ted goes from being in his mid-20s to being in his mid-30s, Marshall and Lily have children, Robin finally makes her journalism career dreams come true, and Barney goes from being a relentlessly single womanizer to someone capable of marrying Robin and becoming a doting father. But all of that is because time passes. Though there are several points where the gang tries to cling to their youthful habits, they eventually realize that time moves on with or without them. It’s a helpful reminder that as much as (like Future Ted) we may enjoy reminiscing about the past, we all end up in the future eventually.

Adulthood Means Giving Up

On the other hand, How I Met Your Mother doesn’t always have the best ideas about how to respond to the passage of time. Where many sitcoms ignore the characters’ work lives, How I Met Your Mother spends a lot of time on the gang’s careers—and the ways in which those careers didn’t play out the way they expected. Marshall goes to law school to become an environmental lawyer but ends up working for a series of evil corporations. Though Ted has a romantic, nerdy interest in architectural history, he ends up supporting the destruction of the historic Arcadian so that he can design his own building. The characters repeatedly justify these decisions because of their need to provide for their families and maintain a certain standard of living.

This ends up suggesting that it’s okay to compromise all your ideals because making money for your loved ones is what really matters most.

The series sometimes implies that success means making lots of money, and more idealistic personal fulfillment is a naive, childish dream. Lily’s work as a kindergarten teacher is rarely presented as gratifying, but more often framed as her not doing anything special with her talents. And when Marshall finally, briefly, gets to work at an environmental law firm, he still doesn’t get to make the impact he wanted and it’s kind of a let-down.

Robin’s dream of being an international journalist isn’t really compatible with her long-term friendships or relationships, which is why for a long time she takes professional steps back and then to truly make it eventually has to sacrifice her personal relationships, including her marriage to Barney, at least for a time.

Waiting For True Love Instead of Settling

How I Met Your Mother believes in fairytale love stories. While Marshall and Lily are lucky enough to find each other early in life, Ted spends nine whole seasons looking for the perfect woman. One big problem? Ted is very picky… and annoying. Still, one of the big lessons of the show is that Ted needed to find someone who actually liked the somewhat grating things about him. Ted does need to change in some ways—especially being less terrible towards women—but he doesn’t need to give up on his interests, or the core of his personality. Ted does eventually find the right person without compromising his core values— So HIMYM makes a case against “settling.”

Putting Your Eggs in One Basket

On the other hand, Ted’s approach to romance is frequently passive. Ted suffers from “main character syndrome,” imagining himself as the protagonist of his own story – as is clear from his narrating to his uninterested kids this lengthy roundabout tale about how the universe revolves around his love life. But the story Ted tells himself requires someone else (a magical dream woman) to just appear out of nowhere and fit perfectly with Ted. The love story of how Ted met the mother of his children is all about coincidences and fate, and being in the right place at the right time. In this way, it sends a message that viewers can’t exactly follow – we’re simply supposed to hope there’s a soulmate out there for us and wait for the universe to provide our happy ending. And in Ted’s case, the universe provides twice – giving him the perfect family he always wanted with Tracy, and then getting her out of the way so he can conveniently also end up with the one he always pined for, Robin.

Love Bombing and Manipulation

Worse still, Ted’s romantic “nice guy” facade allows him to be an arguably even worse guy than Barney. Barney lies to plenty of women over the course of the series, but he minimizes the amount of emotional damage he does by simply leaving after one encounter – and apart from in these one-night stands, he’s pretty honest about who he is. Ted, on the other hand, uses his nice guy persona and romantic values to justify hurting people he claims to care about, like when his attempt to be “honest” with a girlfriend leads him to break up with her on her birthday. Ted’s pursuit of true love is noble in some ways, but it also gives him a convenient excuse for being cruel to anyone he doesn’t deem the one. Throughout the series, Ted tells the story of how he met the mother of his children as if it’s fate, something the universe wanted to happen. Ted’s habit of framing behavior in his dating life as part of destiny makes it easier for him to avoid responsibility for his own actions since they’re simply part of the universe’s “plan” for him. If he does something terrible to a woman he’s dating, who are they to argue against destiny? Nowhere is this more apparent than in Ted’s relationship with Robin. From the beginning, Ted treats his infatuation with Robin as an epic love story, which makes it easier to justify his creepy behavior, and his ceaseless pursuit carries on even when Robin has repeatedly told him she isn’t interested in the kind of relationship he wants. And even though he’s so obsessed with her, his self-involvement can lead to treating her badly, too.

Getting Through a Breakup

Sitcoms love to position love stories as being fated, inevitable pairings that simply have to happen. We need Jim to end up with Pam, or for Ross to end up with Rachel. Though How I Met Your Mother loves the idea of this kind of relationship, the show also acknowledges that sometimes relationships just don’t work out. Though Victoria and Ted have a strong relationship, Ted and Victoria break up because of his clear feelings for Robin, something that isn’t anybody’s fault and doesn’t have to be melodramatic. Meanwhile, Robin and Ted are extremely compatible when they date for the first time, but eventually, they realize they shouldn’t be together—not because one of them is evil or malicious, but because they want different things out of life. After they break up, they remain friends for years, even roommates for a while (their eventual reunion only happens much later). And when Robin gets together with Barney, their marriage eventually ends in divorce—but they still try to maintain their friendship as part of the group. Most of the relationships in How I Met Your Mother don’t work out, but they’re still important. With both Stella and Victoria – despite the hurt caused by the relationships or break-ups – Ted finally walks away in a place where everyone understands the others’ motives and wishes each other the best.

Friendships Are True Love, Too

Really, How I Met Your Mother reminds us that friendship can be just as important as romantic relationships. Ted even values being friends with Robin over his relationship with Victoria, and there are several moments throughout the series where the characters indicate that they value their gang over pretty much any partner. And like romantic relationships, friendships also go through rough patches—but even when friends disappear for a while, they can still come back into your life in a meaningful way.

Treating Women As Disposable

Like Seinfeld and Friends before, the characters on How I Met Your Mother date a lot. As we witness Barney’s seemingly endless string of sexual conquests, Ted also blows through relationships. In the process, he frequently adopts Barney’s casual, dismissive approach toward women. Barney formulates an entire system of rules to justify the cruel way he uses and discards women – and the show largely laughs at his code, whether it’s comparing women to inhuman creatures or reducing their value to physical attractiveness. Though the other characters are frequently disgusted with Barney’s behavior and provide a veneer of plausible deniability, the series still ultimately endears him. And while it could be argued that the show’s depiction of this kind of behavior is a critique, it mostly falls short of explicitly calling out this kind of objectification of women, ending instead with a laugh track. There’s even merchandise revolving around Barney’s various schemes.

Ironically, the most disposable woman on How I Met Your Mother is also the title character. Tracy, Ted’s future wife and the mother of his children isn’t fully introduced until the final season of the show. And while this brief glimpse at her would make sense if the series ended with Ted meeting the mother and living happily ever after, the series finale reveals that Tracy has died of an unnamed illness, leaving Ted a widower—who is then free to pursue Robin, again. The entire story of How I Met Your Mother treats Tracy as if she’s not so much a real person, as a fantasy, –someone who exists as an object to give birth to Ted’s children so that he can get back together with the woman he always wanted after having conveniently solved the biggest obstacle to that relationship – the fact that Robin never wanted kids.

Putting Lots of Work Into Love

How I Met Your Mother believes in a storybook version of true love, but the series still acknowledges that “happily ever after” is never really the ending. Through Marshall and Lily, it shows that even the most picture-perfect couples still need to do work to maintain their relationships. When Marshall and Lily, the closest thing the show has to a “perfect” couple, briefly break up in the show’s second season, they come back together stronger than ever, with a sense of who they are as individuals and what they want out of their relationship.

People Outside Your Friend Group Don’t Matter

Sitcoms, by their nature, are focused on a small group of people. We spend so much time with those people that we naturally come to think that that group of friends is the only group of people who matter in the show’s universe. How I Met Your Mother takes this to an extreme where the choice to serve your family and friends, to the exclusion of all else, is presented as the right thing. Marshall even shames Barney for not practicing nepotism and choosing Ted for a job over an architecture firm Barney thought had a better design.

In the end, Ted couldn’t live happily ever after with Tracy because Robin is the person he’s known for the longest and the person who was “family” in the sitcom’s eyes. As Megan Garber wrote for The Atlantic, because the mother was a “relative stranger,” in the end she was, quote, “ultimately just as expendable as everyone else.” It’s nice to put friends and family first – but it’s a little disconcerting when this is taken to such an extreme that it leaves no room for anything else, like putting your principles first or letting new people into your life.

Casting “The One”

How I Met Your Mother featured overwhelmingly white, heterosexual, cis-gendered, physically abled characters in both its starring and its small guest roles. Even within the endless series of women Barney and Ted date, strikingly few of them stray from white, Eurocentric, standards of beauty. When Barney alludes to dating women of color, it’s often framed as a punchline. Viewers called out the show’s racism when three characters played by white actors dressed in stereotypical Asian attire as part of what the creators called an “homage to Kung Fu films.”

There were several homophobic and transphobic jokes throughout the series, including Barney’s trying to pick up a lesbian by styling himself as a woman and copying various lesbian stereotypes, and a running transphobic joke. Robin and the gang also endlessly fat-shame her coworker Patrice while Barney derides “repugnant” women.

Conclusion

Like Friends, Happy Endings, and all other sitcoms that track groups of friends in a big city, How I Met Your Mother is about the process of figuring out what you want from life, and learning how to pursue it– be it love, friendship, or professional success. How I Met Your Father has corrected at least some of the most toxic takeaways from the original show: like, not shaming or belittling women for being open to sex. But overall, it’s aiming for similar emotional lessons, and it’s clear that the central meaningful message of How I Met Your Mother remains as appealing today as ever.

Sources

Garber, Megan. “How I Met Your Aunt: A Bizarre Ending for How I Met Your Mother.” The Atlantic, 1 Apr. 2014, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/04/-em-how-i-met-your-aunt-em-a-bizarre-ending-for-i-how-i-met-your-mother-i/359957/.

“Not a Father’s Day.” Not a Father’s Day, Fox Shop, www.notafathersday.com/.

Stedman, Alex. “‘How I Met Your Mother’ Creators Apologize for Racism in Recent Episode.” Variety, 15 Jan. 2014, variety.com/2014/tv/news/how-i-met-your-mother-creators-apologize-for-racism-in-recent-episode-1201059731/.

Woodward, Ellie. “24 Times ‘How I Met Your Mother’ Was Really Fucking Problematic.” Buzzfeed, 29 Mar. 2018, www.buzzfeed.com/elliewoodward/times-how-i-met-your-mother-was-actually-really.