CURVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (7)

By: Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons
July 20, 2023

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of reconsidered passions, reassessed hates, and reversed feelings everywhere in-between. Series edited by Adam McGovern.

HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER

No, I didn’t hate the series finale of How I Met Your Mother with the same vitriol as so many of the show’s longtime fans. I broke up with HIMYM weeks earlier during the 200th episode, “How Your Mother Met Me.”

It’s too depressing to do the math, but that’s hundreds of hours watching and rooting for Ted Mosby. Hundreds of hours ignoring how horrible Ted treats the women he dates — not taking “No” for an answer, cheating on his long-distance girlfriend, and breaking up with a girl on not one but two of her birthdays. I gave Ted the benefit of the doubt because his past idiocy is prologue to the promised love story with the future mother of his children, aka the owner of the yellow umbrella. Also, because I, too, had spent what felt like a lifetime living and dating in New York City, and I certainly wasn’t proud of many (oh, so many) of my actions.

Then I watched “How Your Mother Met Me.” This critically acclaimed episode, one of the highest-rated of the series, chronicles Cristin Milioti’s journey as “the Mother” and how her life coincides with Ted and the gang’s over the years. Her story begins in 2005 at what appears to be the gang’s local, MacLaren’s Pub, where a woman passes by Barney (a character elevated above unwatchable douchebag due to my enduring love for Neil Patrick Harris) and Ted as they get ready for another round of “Have you met Ted?”

Surprise! It turns out the woman, one of the Mother’s gang, went to the wrong MacLaren’s. The woman takes a cab across town and joins her roommate, the Mother, to celebrate her 21st birthday. Instead, the Mother’s birthday party and future are ruined when she receives a call that her boyfriend, the love of her life, has been killed.

We then get glimpses, over the next several years, of the Mother’s attempts to move on. I assume the fun of all her near-miss meetings with Ted is what made the episode so popular. Except what I saw was a woman who — in place of Ted’s journey of making a mess out of dating person after person, all in the name of finding his person — spent those years grieving the death of the man she believed to be her one true love. Her adulthood is one of emotionally enforced abstinence.

Perfect, because, let’s face it, if a woman slept with as many people and failed at as many relationships as Ted Mosby, how could she ever be worthy enough to own the yellow umbrella? I’m projecting, but “How Your Mother Met Me” completely turned me off the show. At least I was spared the pain of watching the Mother kick the bucket in the finale, which, for viewers, happened about two minutes after she and Ted finally found each other.

All so he could end up with Robin, the first woman whose “No” Ted didn’t take for an answer.

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CURVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (7)

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