“Kids, never underestimate the power of destiny.”
One of the underlying assumptions of How I Met Your Mother
is that Ted Mosby is a textbook “good guy.”
“Aww Ted, you're such a good guy.”
He’s basically a gender-swapped version
of the classic starry-eyed female heroine
from so many sitcoms and romantic comedies
idealistic, vulnerable, and looking for his soulmate.
“It’s like, okay, I’m ready, where is she?”
But what if this given premise is wrong?
What if instead of being a great guy,
Ted is actually a delusional narcissist
who only cares about what he wants, no matter who he hurts?
What if he’s the bad guy?
“Raise your hand if earlier today you hit on an engaged woman?”
Here’s our take on why Ted Mosby
is actually the secret villain of How I Met Your Mother.
“It’s my birthday And you're telling me
I'm not the one for you?!”
“I mean, the odds… it's like you lost the lottery.”
“Oh, so dating you is like winning the lottery?!”
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I’m Susannah.
And I’m Debra.
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From the very first episode,
How I Met Your Mother presents Ted as a sweet, special guy
who should be endeared to us by his sensitive desire
for a blissful happily ever after with “the One”.
“So, do you think you'll ever get married?”
“Well, maybe eventually...
Some fall day,
possibly in central park.”
But over time, Ted’s romantic ideas
come to appear more like narcissistic delusions
which he projects onto a series of unlucky women
who get caught up in his path of destruction.
“Look obviously, You can’t tell a woman
You just met you love her, but it sucks that you can’t.”
When we say that Ted is delusional in this context,
we mean that he holds false beliefs
based on an incorrect interpretation of reality.
He believes that anything he feels for another person
must be real and reciprocal,
because he interprets reality as a romantic epic
in which he is the protagonist.
“Sometimes when you're about to give up on your love life
forever for the 17th time, destiny intervenes.”
And he refuses to allow
other people’s perspectives and emotions
to factor into his assessment of facts.
“She can’t say it’s not to be.
It is meant to be,
and you know why?
Cause I mean it to be.”
We see this from the moment in the first episode
when Ted quickly decides that Robin is his dream girl.
“It was like something from an old movie,
Where the sailor sees the girl across the crowded dance floor,
turns to his buddy and says, "see that girl?
I'm gonna marry her someday."
even though they just met and his intensity
makes her visibly uncomfortable.
Robin’s feelings and interpretation of reality
don’t matter to Ted,
except insofar as they’re obstacles to be overcome.
His desires take precedence over the desires of others.
His feelings determine the truth.
“It's a great look.
But you're looking at the wrong girl.”
“No, I'm not.”
“Yes you are.”
Ted is the kind of guy who won’t even apologize
when he’s clearly wrong.
“Well, at least you apologized.
You apologized, didn't you?”
“I'm sorry, but I am not apologizing.”
a sign that he’s unwilling to question
his perspective of events or challenge his assumption that,
because he’s inherently virtuous, nothing he does can be that bad.
“I'm exhausted from pretending I'm not in love with her.
I think that makes this okay.”
“Oh, please.
You just wanna get laid.”
The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud,
said that when one is wrapped up in delusional behavior,
“he becomes a madman.”
And Ted’s delusions frequently lead to behavior
that makes him look like a mad man to others.
"When you love someone you just- y-you don't stop.
Ever.
Even when people roll their eyes or call you crazy!
Even then, especially then!"
After his initial failed pursuit of Robin,
he’s so insistent on bringing her
as a plus-one to a wedding that he almost breaks up
the couple getting married in the process.
“Then I’m gonna kill Ted.”
But when at the last minute Robin can’t make the wedding,
Ted quickly projects his romantic delusions onto a new target, Victoria.
And just like that,
Ted has moved on from the “love of his life” Robin
to someone whose name he doesn’t even know.
“24 hours ago, you were beg-begging me
to bring some other girl to my wedding
now y-y-you’re over her?”
The show is full of examples where Ted acts selfishly
and screws over women,
while his flattering idea of himself allows him to justify
a pattern of harmful behavior.
“You lied and said you were broken up with Victoria
Before you actually were so you could try to nail Robin
and you wound up losing both girls in one night.”
Take the time that he uses a matchmaking service,
only to have no matches,
likely because his standards are so absurdly specific.
“There are absolutely no women out there for you.”
When it turns out the one woman he’s compatible with
has already been matched up,
Ted does the obvious thing and sneaks into her files,
visits her office under false pretenses and then uses stolen information
to trick her into loving him.
“Summer Breeze is my guilty pleasure song.”
“Oh, it's been stuck in my head
ever since I heard it this weekend at brunch.”
“I love brunch.”
Why should it matter that she and her fiancé
are looking forward to their wedding,
if Ted’s dream of “The One” is at stake?
“Don't you think it's a little impulsive for you
to proposition an engaged woman you don't even know?”
“See?
We're both impulsive.
We're perfect for each other”
There’s the episode where he aggressively pursues,
even stalks, Maggie, the “ultimate girl next door”
using his self-perception as “the good guy who wants love”
as cover for treating a vulnerable woman
just out of a relationship like a prize to be won.
“And now, a very single and available Maggie Wilks
is on her way to this very spot.
I sent a cab with a female driver,
so she'd have no other interaction with a man until she got to me.”
Or when he leaves his own mother’s wedding
and refuses to give a speech, because he thinks it’s not fair
that his mother is getting remarried
before he’s had a chance to have a wedding.
“I have to leave.”
“Wait, Ted, what about your toast?”
Ted can’t conceive of a world
where his desires aren’t validated by reality.
“I think for the most part if you’re really honest with yourself
about what you want out of life, life gives it to you”
and his single-minded faith in his fantasies
makes him incredibly skillful at explaining why all of those
previously mentioned mistakes and manipulations
were in service of a bigger “good guy” picture.
“If you're looking for the word that means caring about someone
beyond all rationality
and wanting them to have everything they want,
no matter how much it destroys you, it's love!”
Since his narration is always in our ear crafting
this alternate version of reality,
we can easily fall into the trap of taking his narrative as
objective truth.
“And as hard as it was at the time,
in the end we both got what we wanted.”
But let’s step back to look at things
from the perspectives of some of the women in his life.
“So, when you tell this story to your friends,
Could you avoid the word ‘psycho’?
I'd prefer... ‘eccentric’”
To Victoria, Ted is the guy who throws away a lifetime
with someone he loves,
to stay friends with a woman he once cheated on her with.
“I really hope you get her someday.”
To Royce, he’s the guy who expects his “baggage”
to be accepted without reservation
“It feels so good to have told you all that stuff about me.
I'm really glad I can open up to you.”
but immediately rejects her when she opens up
about her own imperfections.
“Yeah, you gotta go.”
To Stella, he’s the guy who practically forces her
into a relationship,
complains that things aren’t moving fast enough,
and then breaks up with her when she moves faster.
“She invited you to a wedding?”
“Six months from now.
As in, we’ll be together six months from now.”
After then proposing to her out of the blue,
he invites both of their exes to the wedding without consulting her.
Essentially pushing her back
into the arms of her child’s father, Tony,
and later reappears in her life to badmouth her so badly
that Tony temporarily breaks up with her,
while Ted refuses to help fix the mess he caused.
“I love him.”
“Oh, you love him?
So what?
y-y-you're appealing to the romantic in me?”
When Tony makes a movie about their love triangle,
Ted is outraged to see himself portrayed as the villain
and Tony as the hero
because for once he’s lost control of the narrative.
“This is a terrible movie!
And it got everything wrong!”
Ted only feels better after Marshall reassures him
of the fundamental belief that holds his universe together:
“A guy called Ted Mosby.
A guy who’s uncynical and sincere.
I believe that deep down, you're still that guy.”
“I am still that guy.”
Then there’s Robin.
From her perspective, she’s a young journalist
who moved to New York to follow her professional dreams
and happens to meet a cute guy at a bar one night.
They have a nice date, but before they can head upstairs
she has to run out to cover a story.
Surely she can see this guy some other time.
Except, in this case,
the guy shows back up later that night.
But before they can start making out, he drops a bomb on her.
“I think I’m in love with you.”
“What?”
This is a major red flag.
And after all that,
she has to wake up the next morning and find her doormat covered in vomit.
For Robin, this isn’t a huge deal.
She went out with a guy,
it got a little weird, she can move on.
But then, she runs into Ted’s friends at the bar
and admits to Lily that while she likes Ted,
she’s looking for something casual.
“He's just looking for
something a little bit more serious than I am.
I mean the most I can handle right now is something casual.
This just stays between us, right?”
Next thing she knows, Ted is “casually”
three days in a row inviting her to his seventy-two-hour party.
“I wish your party was tonight” “It is.
The party’s tonight.”
She’s new in town and wants to meet people
so she shows up on the third night,
only to find that Ted constructed these parties just for her.
“I didn’t throw this party to set you up with Carlos,
or the one before that...”
Robin should probably get the hell away from this guy
at this point, but, she likes his friends
and doesn’t know many folks in the city.
“I just haven't met a lot of good people so far.”
so she continues hanging out with the gang
and she and Ted transition into friends.
Eventually, Robin does start having feelings for Ted,
so she gives him a chance and agrees to accompany him
to a friend’s wedding.
“Do you want to be my date?”
“Your date?”
“I'd love to.”
But when she shows up late because of a work conflict,
she sees that Ted has already re-focused
his romantic energy on a woman that he just met.
Despite being hurt, Robin tries to be a supportive friend
about Ted’s new relationship,
waiting until it seems like his long-distance relationship
has ended to make a move.
“We broke up.”
Except this is a lie.
“It was your girlfriend”
So from Robin’s perspective, Ted is someone
who has emotionally pressured her and tried to trick her
into dating him, only to leave her behind
at a moment’s notice when she doesn’t fit into his schedule,
before proving he’s capable
of both lying to and cheating on women he supposedly loves.
Soon she’ll learn that he’s also the sort of guy
who (not long after the lying-cheating incident)
shows up to the dinner where she’s getting an award
with a hot date he thinks is a prostitute,
just to rub it in her face.
“Mary, uhh you wanna go upstairs?”
And the first season’s not even over yet!
Ted breaks into Robin’s apartment and, in front of a hired string quartet,
awkwardly demands an immediate answer about their romantic future:
“I need an answer.”
“If you want me to say yes right now,
I-I can't do that.”
Well, if it's not yes, then it's a no.”
After Robin does start dating Ted,
she has to deal with his lying
about all the stuff in his apartment that’s from his exes,
“Whose moisturizer is this Ted?”
“Umm... my sister’s.”
demanding that she send her beloved dogs up to her aunt’s farm,
"Yes, I want you to get rid of your dogs."
shaming her for the number of men she’s slept with.
“And then there was Derek.
And counting you,
that puts the total up to-” “Oh, I got your total.”
and proving that he can’t be trusted to keep her secrets.
“I can't believe you told us Robin's secret.”
“Huh?
How could I keep something like that to myself?”
most importantly, they break up because Ted
isn’t willing to accept Robin for who she is.
“In five years, I probably want to be married.”
“And I probably want to be in Argentina.”
“Argentina?”
As much as he loves being with Robin,
he loves his vision of a Picket-fence,
two-kid future more.
And that would be okay, if he accepted that trade-off
and committed to their resulting friendship.
Instead, he periodically seizes on moments
when she’s vulnerable to profess his undying love for her.
“But he couldn't look past this.
I mean, who could?”
“I could…
I love you, Robin.”
“How long have you been hung up on Robin?
Eight years?!
And you're still killing yourself to fetch dumb little trinkets for her.”
and right to the end of the series
keeps trying to force her into his idea of a happy ending,
which all along she’s made clear she doesn’t want.
“Just tell me...
Do you love me?”
“No.”
So, a lot of the time,
the way Ted acts toward the woman of his dreams...
kind of sucks.
“Goodnight, psycho.”
[shouting] “Maybe you’ve got more in common with Barney.”
The show initially sets up Barney and Ted
as the yin and yang of their social circle,
with Barney as a reckless misogynist and Ted as a kind-hearted romantic.
But in reality, these two
are more similar than they are distinct.
“Hey Barney, I need your help,
this hottie I’m talking to is meeting her friend at a club
so I need a wingman.”
Throughout the series, Barney serves as Ted’s diabolical sidekick
the friendly demon in his ear, enabling behaviors
that should be antithetical for the archetypal nice guy.
[whispering] “I am not taking a prostitute to Robin’s banquet.”
“Dude, the only people that will know are you, me, and Marshall.
No one will suspect a thing.”
Ted makes a performance of distancing himself from Barney,
but these half-hearted protests never stop him
from going along with Barney’s plans.
“Do you think maybe you might... need a wingman again?”
“I do.”
There are also numerous instances when Ted out-Barney’s Barney.
After he decides that his bad behavior is being rewarded
at a St Patrick’s Day party they attend,
“Okay it’s official, do bad things, good things happen.”
he quickly ditches their two dates outside
because he hears that the girls inside the club are “drunker,”
he lies about who he is to put champagne and caviar
on someone else’s tab, and he hooks up with a married woman.
“You kissed a married woman Ted,
you committed credit card fraud,”
As a professor, He pursues a relationship
with a student at his college even when he knows
it could put her scholarship (as well as his job) at risk.
classic Barney behavior.
And that’s not even counting all the times that Ted
can’t even remember the names of the women he dated.
“I was dating this girl named... oh god what was her name...
for the sake of story let’s call her...”
“Everyone this is blah blah.”
Mounting evidence suggests that deep down
Ted is much more like Barney than his other best friend,
honest, devoted monogamist Marshall.
“Here?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s the t-shirt isn’t it?”
“No… a little.”
“Something is seriously wrong with you.”
Barney himself sees this resemblance between him and Ted.
“See, for all your big talk about being ready for a relationship,
deep down you're single.
It's your default setting.”
He speaks of the “little Barney” inside Ted controlling his behavior.
“You know what's in the back of your brain?
secretly controlling your every move?”
“A little Barney.”
And we actually see Ted blame Barney for his own misdeeds
“That was Barney.”
“That was you, Ted.”
as if on some level he does think of this friend
as an id-like inner presence instigating his worst behaviors.
“Well hello...
“Sorry babe, I gotta take this.”
At points the show even suggests
that Barney is secretly a nicer guy than Ted.
“Don't sleep with Anita.”
“Done.”
“Tonight before dinner?”
“No.”
“How about you?
You interested?”
“Yeah.”
Just consider how each of them reacts
when Lily leaves Marshall and goes to San Francisco.
Ted decides that being a good friend to Marshall
means calling Lily, who’s also one of his best friends,
a slur that’s most likely the c-word.
“You gotta get over that grinch.”
“But I didn’t say grinch.”
Barney on the other hand,
seeing all of the pain that Marshall is in,
takes constructive action: he goes on a secret mission
to find Lily and beg her to go back to New York.
“You have to come home.
You and Marshall belong together.”
And to top it off, he makes sure
that no one knows about his kind act.
“Never, ever tell anyone I was here.
I will deny it tooth and nail.
This trip never happened.”
Ted is the kind of friend who guilts his besties
into throwing parties three nights in a row
so he can potentially seduce a girl,
not caring that Marshall has an important law school paper to write
“I'm jeopardizing my law career so that you can throw not one,
not two, but three parties for some girl that you just met
who's probably not even gonna show up.”
But Barney repeatedly takes steps
to materially improve his friends’ lives.
“I finished your video resume on my own,
messengered it to every station in the city,
a guy from channel 8 called, he loved you,
he wanted you to come in and audition.”
One year he even uses his massive Christmas bonus,
after some initial selfish temptation,
to donate ten-thousand-dollars to Sam Gibb’s congregation,
“And there’s more.”
along with racks of his suits so that underprivileged people
could have clothes for job interviews.
So while Barney is often a monster, he’s capable of selfless deeds.
Ted, not so much.
“She's not getting rid of the dogs!”
“What's the matter with you?”
“Even I wouldn't do that.”
Ted’s actively identifying as a good guy
is what makes him so dangerous.
His delusional belief that he’s the leading man
in a romantic comedy written by God,
and starring all of humanity as his supporting cast,
allows him to let himself off the hook
for awful behavior.
(sarcastically) “What could she mean when she says 'no'?
Oh, I don't know, it is totally cryptic.”
“What?
This is far from over.”
Because how can anything he does ever be that bad,
if his intentions are so good?
“You put yourself and a girl you like in some romantic setting,
the stars line up, and shazam.”
This mindset is also why Ted is miserable
for almost the entire nine-season run of the show:
real life will never match the fantasies of romantic grandeur
that he has constructed in his head.
This is perfectly exemplified by his obsession with
winning a second chance with Natalie, the girl he dumped on her birthday.
When he’s not with her, he becomes irrationally convinced
that life with her would be perfect.
“I had so many fond memories of her:
The tea candles on her dresser, The sock monkey collection on her bed,
Her smile...”
But almost as soon as he gets what he asks for,
he’s dissatisfied,
and is so anxious to discard her
that he can’t even respect her feelings enough
to wait a day and avoid ruining her birthday a second time.
“I wanna break up.
I don’t think you’re the one for me.”
There’s actually a psychological term to describe
Ted’s favored seduction technique: Love Bombing,
which is a common method used by delusional narcissists
to blindside their partners with affection
early in relationships.
“I came home and I found him waiting in my apartment
with a string quartet-” “Oh that’s so sweet.”
“Okay yes it’s sweet in theory but isn’t it also kind of crazy?”
While this might not sound so bad,
according to professor Suzanne Degges-White,
“Individuals who are especially high in the trait of narcissism
may see others simply as objects to satisfy their desire
for connection or manipulation.”
“Hey Robin, it’s Teddy bear, need a little honey?”
When it comes to their cultural impact on viewers,
characters like Ted Mosby run the dangerous risk of modeling
a self-serving “good guy” persona that’s more likely to encourage
narcissistic behavior in men,
than show them what truly loving conduct looks like.
“I just had decent sex with an awful human being!
I am back!”
It’s inevitable that viewers will look
to popular examples like Ted to see how a “romantic guy” acts,
but in reality they’re learning a troubling set of behaviors.
“Hello?”
“Hey Ted.”
“Hey Tiffany.”
“Sorry Henrietta, something came up.”
And as the show demonstrates again and again,
this pattern of behavior not only hurts Ted’s partners,
it also makes him deeply unhappy and unable to appreciate
the many blessings that fill his life.
We don’t actually see what happens
after Ted finally gets what he’s wanted
for nearly a decade and unites with Robin.
But based on what we’ve witnessed,
is there really any reason to believe that he’s at last going to be happy?
How could any reality ever live up to the impossible dream
he’s long nurtured of fairy-tale bliss with this woman?
"There's no top 5, Robin.
There's just a top one Robin,
and it's you."
So should we feel bad about enjoying the various romantic misadventures
of Ted in How I Met Your Mother?
Absolutely not!
But we should be careful to remember that Ted represents a cautionary tale
about what happens when delusional fantasies
prevent you from being open to connecting with other human beings
as they really are.
“Let her go.”
“No, this is destiny.”
“No, Ted, this is forcing it.”
Maybe the lesson that Ted should’ve taught his kids
in the drawn-out story of how he met their mother is,
“Look to your Uncle Marshall as a better standard
for how a good guy actually behaves.”
“Some people aren’t going to get their gifts in time for Christmas?”
“Sadly, no.”
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