You're probably starting to get antsy about how any of this has anything to do with How I Met Your Mother, hey? Alright, let me get into that.
How I Met Your Mother, for those of you who aren't as familiar, is a sitcom framed as a father in the near future telling his children (surprise, surprise) the story of how he met their mother. For nine seasons the show was barely even about Ted, the narrator, finding his future wife. The show was mostly about Ted and his group of wacky friends and their wacky lives. Hilarity ensues.
For the first eight seasons, the identity of the mother was this big mystery with just bits of clues and characters just barely missing each other. The mother pretty much never came up except for when Ted would tell his kids about how he almost met her, or how he was essentially falling in love with her before he had even met her.
There was also a slap bet, which was awesome and one of the few episodes I actually caught before I was really into the show.
At the same time, a big part of the story wasn't about the slap bets, the Bro Codes, or even about the mystery of the mother. It was the story of Ted and Robin: two people who at various points fell in love, dated, broke up, stayed friends, possibly remained in love... and as most sitcoms went, this unending "will they or won't they?" would be one of the main pillars of the series' storyline.
Except in the very first episode, Ted tells us that Robin is not the mother. For nine seasons, we always knew that the mysterious mother that Ted would fall hopelessly in love with was not going to be Robin.
And yet there they were, for nine seasons wavering in and out of what could or could not be. Except we knew it would not be. And I suppose had I been watching every week from the very beginning, had the long-term investment in these characters set in, I could see their relationship as being very stressful to me.
Especially to me. Kids, as I've already mentioned, I had already gone through my decade-long story of almost getting together with "The Girl". All the bad timing, all the bits where things just never seem to work out. I have spent more than a few nights wondering if I had just wasted away my life on this idea that very well may have never meant to be in the first place...
And that's okay.
