How I Met Your Mother has been one of my favorite shows for a while. Sure the last two seasons have dragged and last night’s series finale was a solid okay (though personally I like getting loose ends tied up) but I’m a big fan nonetheless. Love the ending or hate it, last night’s finale got me thinking about the show and the characters overall.
One thing that’s always annoyed me is that Robin moves to New York City, meets Ted a few months in, then meets Marshall, Lily, and Barney and becomes their best friend basically overnight.
This just doesn’t happen.
Yes, I realize this is television and therefore not real but I’ve always been bothered by ultra-unrealistic things in movies, TV, novels, etc. When things just seem so impossible that I can’t wrap my head around them they lose creditability to me.
That’s until I realized that I am Robin.
For those who know my family, no I don’t mean that I am Robin as in my mother (her name is Robin) although the parallels in her life and my own are uncanny. I don’t even mean that I can most relate to Robin’s character (I am way too much of a sap). I mean that just a short bit of time after moving to Atlanta I met some friends who turned into a pretty solid Atlanta friend group for me quite quickly.
For so long I was convinced that this was a fatal flaw within HIMYM. I guess in reality I was just never in a situation that really lent itself to letting me see that friendships can form this fast. Yes, it happened in college but college is a microcosm that can’t be compared to anything else; and it’s happened in some relationships for me but, well, I don’t want to get into that right now. Sure some friendships can be surface or built on a singular, mutual interest that ultimately fades away. And of course friendships can evolve and shift over any period of time. But that’s any relationship no matter how quickly and how they form. The finale shows us this.
So as a television show about friends living unrealistic lives in NYC (like any sitcom, c’mon!! what are these apartments!?!) about emotional endurance, about the shifts in your twenties and thirties and weathering all of those changes with friends and family comes to a close, I take a moment to reflect on my sometimes unrealistic, but somehow real, life. The friends I’ve made so quickly here in Georgia, also the friends I’ve made quickly and slowly in other parts of the world. I’m happy to have you all in my life.
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