How I Met Your Mother (After Breaking A Million Hearts)

I stopped watching How I Met Your Mother on a regular basis about halfway through season seven. After Robin’s fake non-pregnancy, Barney breaking up with Nora only to have Robin not break up with Kevin, one too many appearances of Chris Elliot as Lily’s annoying absentee father, and general wheel-spinning of the overall plot, I was tired of giving the show my time on Monday nights. But I’ve still been following the plot from a distance when I read myEntertainment Weekly and blogs.

I read that, in the season finale, Barney proposed to his girlfriend Quinn (Becki Newton), but a flashforward revealed a completely predictable outcome TOTAL SHOCKER that he would eventually marry Robin instead. Also, Ted ran off with Victoria, the non-Mother love interest he had sparked with the most, as she fled her wedding. (Also, Marshall and Lily had a baby whose middle name was Waitforit, crossing the line between “funny in-joke” and “OMG so embarrassing stop it right the hell now.”)

Now, How I Met Your Mother is a television show, not a movie, but I’m talking about it as part of the Rom-Com Project because it’s using one of my least favorite romantic comedy tropes, where cheating and breaking hearts is glorified as tragically romantic on the path to true love.

Look at Robin and Barney’s relationship this season. Robin was just about to profess her True Love Feelings to Barney RIGHT when he got a fateful phone call from Nora. Then Robin tried to get over Barney while dating her therapist Kevin (gross). Then Barney and Robin slept together, and Barney broke up with Nora, but in a twist that everyone NO ONE saw coming, Robin decided to stay with Kevin because the plot required her to she wasn’t ready to be with the man she truly loved. Eventually Barney got over his heartbreak with Robin and started dating Quinn to the point where he was ready to marry her…except next season, he will eventually break up with her and marry Robin. That leaves us with one failed Robin relationship and two hearts Barney broke in the Barney/Robin relationship roadkill.

And what of Ted? Ted, who broke up with Victoria in season one after he cheated on her with Robin, and will most certainly break up with Victoria again sometime in season eight, because we all know that she’s not the Mother. In the second go-around of the Ted/Victoria relationship, Victoria is a willing participant in her own eventual heartbreak, but she still broke the heart of the guy she left at the altar in order to be with Ted.

Maybe I shouldn’t criticize the show too harshly. After all, people often have many different romantic relationships before meeting The One. But there’s a difference between beginning and ending a relationship in good faith, and dragging out a relationship that clearly isn’t working for the purpose of killing time. How I Met Your Mother has traveled down this path twice with Ted, once with Robin, and twice with Barney – and yet, we’re still supposed to root for these people to be happy.

At least in the case of Ted, we know both times that his ill-advised relationship choices are doomed from the start. When Ted cheated on Victoria and still ended up with Robin four episodes later, there was still a bittersweet aspect to their getting together because we knew that it wouldn’t last. The case is the same for Victoria now that he’s dating her for the second time. But Robin and Barney have strung other people along, and will probably continue to string people along, until they’re finally ready to be together, and the writers expect the audience to continue to cheer them on. “Who cares if they have to trample on other hearts to get there because Barney and Robin belong together!”

Also, is it normal to have four people in a group of five friends experience a broken engagement at one point or another? Ted was left at the altar, Barney and Quinn are going to break up, and Marshall and Lily broke up. (Yes, they got back together, but it was still emotionally trying for both characters, so I’m counting it as part of the broken hearts club.) Next season, is Robin going to enter an engagement only to call it off, just so she’ll fit in with her highly dysfunctional friends?

Whatever happens, I’m not sure I’ll be watching. This show has had so many false starts and disappointing endings, with so many temporary love interests for the main characters. I have no problem with temporary love interests as long as they’re entertaining, but few of them, with the exceptions of Victoria and Stella (at least early on) were worth watching. Wake me when The Mother shows up.