What I learned from watching HIMYM for the second time
Are we developing like our favorite TV characters do?
I recently started re-watching How I Met Your Mother from season one. For some people, it might sound cheesy — re-watching all nine seasons of your favorite TV series. It is as if I have so many spare times. I have to admit that sometimes I stay late at night and going late to the office the next day. But having been through what I’m considering one of the worst turbulences in my life, I decided that revisiting a legend…wait for it… dary TV series might be a good distraction.
And that’s when it happened — what happened when you consume a cultural product (book, movie, song, or TV shows) for the second time and it doesn’t feel the same.
When I first started watching HIMYM, I was just a high school student, wondering what it’s like to live in New York City. I even dedicated one of my blog posts to Robin Scherbatsky — all I knew I wanted was to be a career woman and appear on TV. And I desperately wanted to see “The Mother”. And when the series finished with its twisted ending, I believed in true love so much to the point that I intentionally bought a yellow umbrella during a vacation abroad (and left it at the hostel I stayed in after writing “Whoever finds this umbrella, may you find your Ted or Tracy” on it).
And these days, when I started re-watching it with knowing how the story would end, I see different things. I see how Robin was already 27 years old when she moved to New York to start her career, how Marshall was disappointed in himself when he became a corporate sellout, how Lily tried to find her passion but ended up in kindergarten teaching job again, how Ted let go of his architect dream and took the professor job for a while, and how it took Barney several attempts on serious relationship and one divorce before he could fully commit to a person — his daughter.
On my first encounter with the series, I was naive — a girl with dreamy eyes craving for a cool friendship like the gang. What I didn’t realize was that the characters all went through difficult phases that I too am experiencing and about to experience later in life. What I didn’t realize and what I currently see at my second encounter is that as cool as the friendship and their lives seem on TV, they all sacrificed something at the end.
For example, I don’t think Marshall and Lily would be the best couple in the world if Lily chose career over family. Marshall, on the other hand, wouldn’t be able to build a financially stable family for a kid to grow if he hadn’t taken the corporate job at the first place. Robin obviously sacrificed a lot to be a very successful news anchor. Ted had his heart broken countless times before finding “The Mother” and starting a family. And Barney — Barney’s whole life is a cry for help and he had a hard time dealing with his issues before being able to commit to his newly-born daughter.
…what HIMYM taught us is that it would always be better at the end — with the help of your friends, the universe, and some interventions.
Maybe a lot of people are angry about the ending — “The Mother” dying and everything. But great TV series are about great character development. And as much as the gang often goes back to square one even after they’ve moved places — Ted still having the hots for Robin, Barney being a pervert again after the divorce, and Robin choosing career over love over and over again — they tried as hard as they can to fight their own devils and be a better person.
Re-watching HIMYM makes me realize that what I’m experiencing now, as a 23-year-old who feels a little lost, is not that special. We will all eventually feel lost — it’s whether-being-lost-pushes-you-to-a-character-development that counts. And what HIMYM taught us is that it would always be better at the end — with the help of your friends, the universe, and some interventions.
