We need to have an intervention – it has officially been one year since the finale of How I Met Your Mother and we’ve had plenty of time to come to terms with how it ended. Countless negative articles have discussed the unfairness of the ending for dedicated fans and why the show was such a disappointment. What these articles fail to point out is everything we learned from the series along the way and how it resulted in the heartbreaking ending.
I feel that the entire nine seasons of How I Met Your Mother can be summed up by one quote from Ted Mosby during season 6, episode 23; “Sometimes things need to fall apart to make way for better things”. This is so obviously what the show was all about and it’s important to remember that advice in our everyday lives as well. We met Ted’s true love in the very first episode but their relationship had to fall apart. Ted’s soul mate ultimately led him to meet the mother, which was exactly what he needed. In the very end, things need to fall apart once again in order for Ted to be with his true love, but this time with everything in life he always dreamed of.
How I Met Your Mother was never really about the mother, it was about the overall story. There were so many memorable things that had to have happened before Ted could meet his wife. It was a story about friendship, many romances, running jokes, and how they all were entwined so that the ending would make total sense. The finale was certainly heartbreaking, but it also portrayed how life really works out.
When you think about it, the ending wasn’t all that shocking. There were so many hints dropped in prior seasons that it seems wrong for fans to call it unfair. We all learned the incredible story of how Ted met his children’s mother. We even got an added bonus – a look into the future and how it all turns out. As dedicated How I Met Your Mother fans, we got exactly what we were watching for all along and had plenty of laughs and cries during the course of its nine season run. Now, one year later, I’m still praising one of the most legendary shows of all time and hoping the unhappy fans will begin to acknowledge the important lessons we learned from Ted and the gang.