Okay bear with me, I know how I met your mother ended ages ago but I’ll never get over the ending, it bothers me to no end because I love the show. Recently I had a discussion with a friend about the ending regarding Ted and Robin and we couldn’t agree so now I need to rant here as well.
So here’s my ted talk on Ted Mosby:
Robin and Ted shouldn’t have ended up together, they were zero compatible. Barney and Robin should have, not only for their great storyline but because he gets her. He accepts her for who she truly is. He knows she needs to be independent, she’s her own boss, her own person and he’s okay with it. The show was very specific that one of the many reasons Ted and Robin didn’t work out besides wanting different things in life, was that Ted wanted a princess. There’s a whole episode dedicated to showcasing how Ted wants a woman to need him but Robin doesn’t need him, in fact she doesn’t need anybody. That was the thing that made their relationship fail, Ted hated that she didn’t need him as much as he needed her, she didn’t love him as much as he loved her. Their love was unidirectional. Ted is the kind of guy who just needs to be part of a couple he doesn’t like being alone, we all know someone like that and Robin is not it.
I don’t dislike Ted, I think he is a great super relatable character just not right for Robin. Also he has a bit of a “nice guy complex” and that is one of his flaws as a person. He doesn’t get why he can’t get the committed relationship he wants if he’s a nice guy, with a decent job, who wants to settle down and a have a family. Which on paper is every girls dream, or what people think girls dream about. Despite claiming this, he was never genuinely interested in his partners, most of the times he dated some girl just because he didn’t want to be alone. I’m sorry but that bothers me. You can’t be romantically involved with someone just because you’re desperate to fulfill what you thinks is “the check-list of life” aka “the white picket fence, suburban family dream”, and what is even worse you can’t force someone like Robin that has different goals for her life to do it with you. That’s incredibly selfish.
There’s different guys for everything, there are the guys like Marshall and Ted that are the stereotype of the kind of guys you would take home and introduce to your parents, the one you have a serious relationship with or at least that’s what the show tries to tell us. In the other hand we have guys like Barney, that are the guys you fuck with once in a while because you want it kinky. But the guy spectrum shouldn’t be reduced to just that two extremes.
Now that we are getting to Barney, I know he was far from perfect, he made a lot of mistakes. But the one thing I have to defend him for is that he had very few serious committed relationships but he always gave his 100% in every one of them. Whereas Ted had a lot of serious relationships but he put at least 10% in each one. He was obsessed with finding the perfect girl, the one that accomplished all of his requirements and he had no problem in tossing aside the girls that he didn’t consider to be ideal partners.
He never understood (and the show never made him) the fact that a person perfectly designed for you doesn’t exist. You can find the ideal person for you but it’s never going to be perfect because the truth is that relationships requiere work and compromise and a bit of sacrifice. There will be things that your partner will do that you might dislike and that’s completely normal. The Netflix rom-com Set It Up has an amazing quote that fits this: “We like because and we love in spite of”. That’s it, that’s what relationships are all about and Ted failed to understand this. All of this is a perfectly reasonable explanation of why Ted and Robin shouldn’t have been together. Robin and Barney is my real endgame and I’ll pretend they are happily traveling the world for the rest of my life.
