How I Met Your Mother is, arguably, one of the most iconic TV shows of our generation with Barney Stinson’s “legendary” catchphrase and general absurdness, Lily and Marshall’s storybook romance that makes everyone jealous, and endless jokes about Robin’s infamous career as “Robin Sparkles.” Not to mention the premise being great on paper – a dad telling his kids how he met their mother without us actually meeting her until the last season. While the plotline did drag on at times (9 seasons!) and we all, at some point, did get tired of only getting hints about the mother’s identity, it was a pretty decent show. Except for the series finale (but I digress).
But no matter how much I enjoyed the show, I could never like Ted Mosby. At every twist and turn in I found my dislike of him mounting. By the end, I was hoping he didn’t ever find the “mother” just because I didn’t think he’d deserve her. And after googling the topic, I found that I was not the only one who felt this way.
So why should we all avoid the Ted Mosby’s in the world?
On the surface, he seems like the average main character of a sitcom – a good guy looking for love in all the wrong places. But the flaw comes in the fact that he really isn’t that good of a person to begin with. His whole goal in life is to find someone to settle down with and have the white picket fence and 2.5 kids, which isn’t a bad goal in it of itself. However, he doesn’t really do anything to work for it. He whines all the time, but when it comes to relationships, he doesn’t give it his all. You can’t expect to get something for nothing, but Ted Mosby certainly does.
He expects things to be easy, but life isn’t easy. Especially when it comes to relationships. Yet, Ted is always the one who freaks out at the littlest things going wrong and is stubborn about trying to fix them or bend to accommodate others. He walks away from the hard things in life instead of sticking around to weather the storm. That’s not a quality I want in a friend or spouse.
The worst part is that, after doing nothing to change it, he moans to everyone and their mother about how much his life sucks. There’s only so much self-pity a person can take before they need to get away from you. When he finally does take charge of his life in the last season, he makes plans to move and start fresh because he’s upset all his friends are so successful without him. I’m sorry their success is holding you back Ted, what a drag. He basically is moving because he feels like the lamest one in the group. Who does that? I’m happy for my successful friends! Heck, I want to stick around just so their success rubs off on me!
He has an awesome apartment, a job that he likes and gets well-paid for, and amazing friends. And a revolving door of pretty women who actually seem to like him. Yet he’s still pompous and preachy with his high expectations and plans for some unrealistic future where his life is perfect. He also gets mad that people don’t appreciate him for how “nice” he is to them. Well, Ted, you shouldn’t be nice to someone just because you want something in return.
And then there’s how he treats women, which is the real kicker for me. There is an infinite number of times he screwed up when it came to love, so many that I don’t know how his friends didn’t kill him. There was the time he broke up with a girl through her answering machine. Or the time he got mad at Barney for sleeping with Robin (when they’d been broken up for quite awhile already). And the time he lied to Robin about breaking up with his girlfriend and almost got her to sleep with him. He’s the guy who says he’s fine with your rejection, but then secretly holds a grudge against you for it. He tells you he can deal with being “just friends” but never stops trying to get with you. He’s the type of guy who wants to possess you and have you be consumed by him. And that’s not really love, is it?
I’m not saying he’s evil. I’m just saying he’s toxic. Don’t let yourselves be pulled down by the Teds of the world. They’re not worth your time. Life will never be like a fairytale, and the sooner the Teds accept that, the sooner they can learn to just live.
