Many sitcoms come and go, but very few get marked down as the best shows of their time. "How I Met Your Mother", airing from 2005 to 2014, is easily one of the funniest shows to have come out in the past couple decades. However, in addition to being laugh-out-loud hilarious, "How I Met Your Mother" harbors many valuable life lessons within its whopping 208 episodes. Here are ten of the most important:
1. There's no ticking clock when it comes to finding your soulmate.
So many people in their twenties believe that if they aren't in a relationship or bordering on getting married then they're failures in the love department and will ultimately end up alone.
In "How I Met Your Mother", Ted, an eternally hopeless romantic, struggles through the show's nine seasons with finding love, losing it, and fearing that he will never find "the one". However, by season nine, his perfect match finally crosses his path as perfect matches tend to do, proving that if you stay patient and optimistic, you will ultimately end up happy.
2. Rushing or forcing relationships almost always ends in disaster.
Whether it's Ted's rash proposal to his girlfriend Stella, who he barely knows and later leaves him at the altar, or Barney and Robin's hurried (and frankly, unexpected) engagement which ended in a divorce, "How I Met Your Mother" taught us that healthy relationships take time to culminate (as seen in Marshall and Lily's nine year relationship before they got engaged). If it's meant to be it'll be and jumping into things too quickly for the wrong reasons will always be a bad idea.
3. Behind every playboy is a damaged kid.
Barney Stinson, everybody.
4. You can be friends with your exes.
If a relationship ended in a healthy manner and was mutually agreed upon, it's totally fine to keep your exes in your life. After all, depending on the relationship, a breakup can feel more like losing a best friend than a lover and that's the real tragedy.
5. There's a reason why relationships fail.
If you broke up once, you'll more than likely break up again. "How I Met Your Mother" emphasized this fact time after time. Some things are better off being left in the past.
6. It's okay to not have it all together.
As the characters struggle with their careers, relationships, and families, we can see that at no age does anyone actually have it all figured out. There will always be trials and tribulations and good days and bad days, but as long as you keep the people you love at your side it will all be okay.
But on that note...
7. Even the best of friends drift apart, but that doesn't mean they can't drift back together.
In the last season of "How I Met Your Mother", we see our beloved friend group start to drift apart as their lives take different directions. Lily makes a point to try and keep everything the same as usual, but fails because that's how life works-- people change and move on, but that doesn't need to be sad. Life is all about cherishing passed memories but also making new ones. And even if you drift away from your friends, always make a point to be there for "the big moments".
8. Things don't always turn out as expected.
At the end of "How I Met Your Mother", we find out that the "mother" we've been waiting for Ted to meet for nine seasons has been dead the whole time after dying from an undisclosed illness. We also find out that rather than the point of the story being for Ted to tell his kids how he met their mother, it's actually a tool to help Ted explain to his children that he's in love with Robin and wants their blessing to ask her out. This was a total bittersweet curveball for fans of the show, but it also rang true with real life. Things don't always work out how we intend them to and the best thing to do is to roll with the punches and keep moving forward.
9. Don't take people for granted.
In addition to the death of Tracy (the mother) at the end of the series, the characters on the show experience personal losses. In a flashback in the final season we see that Tracy tragically lost Max, her first love, in a car accident. And in what is arguably one of the most heartbreaking episodes of the series entitled "Bad News", Marshall loses his father and has to deal with that loss for the following few episodes.
These instances teach us never to take the people we care about for granted because they can be gone in a matter of minutes.
10. Don't ever give up on love.
For those of you who haven't seen "How I Met Your Mother", it is on Netflix Instant currently so go check and out and I guarantee you will be hooked from the first episode. If you're a fan of the series, feel free to leave what lessons you've learned from the show in comments below!
