Ted Mosby is not a Nice Guy

Ted Mosby from How I Met Your Mother is not a nice guy. Façade-ing as a good guy searching for true love, Ted went out and dated and slept with girls after girls for at least a decade, then after a number of years, now spends another decade to “share” all of his exotic experiences with his teenage children. “This is the story of how I met your mother”, he said. “I slept with this girl and that girl, etc. including your aunt Robin whom I still have a crush on”, he might as well have said. Oh and, I’ll briefly talk about your mother at the very end so that we won’t feel so bad.

At one episode, Ted’s friends (I think it was Marshall) pointed out how on each gathering occasion, such as Thanksgiving or Christmas, Ted would invite his girlfriend at that time to attend, she would be in the group picture, and never to reappear in the next one. How sad is that? How can we enter another person’s life, be a part of it, and then disappear (or in this case, make them disappear) forever? But good ole Ted did that, over and over. If someone spends some time to do some statistics, Ted may have slept with more people than Barney, the supposedly Don Juan of the group. In another popular show, The Big Bang Theory, Amy asks Penny if sleeping with 30 would constitute her as a slut. Well, respectfully, is our Mr. Mosby a slut? Probably not. He is a guy and our cultural perceptions on guys are different. But he must be a real big jerk.

Or so I thought.

I had this girlfriend Jenny from high school. We would be together everywhere. We weren’t just dating, we were good buddies. Now I look at the group pictures I had at the time, among our friends I would see myself, and I would see her.

Then we broke up and moved on. Still friends though, because being high school classmates is not something you can easily erase. Years went by, and one day I found myself gotten married with Arwen, another person who I met in high school, Jenny and I’s old classmate. But I couldn’t invite Jenny to our wedding: she’s my ex. And I look at the recent pictures when we went out to spend time with the old high school class, Jenny is not in them. I suddenly realize that she wasn’t there simply because we no longer dated, just like how she were in the older pictures simply because we were dating. I date someone and they are allowed to be in the pictures; I break up with them and they are no longer included.

Good Lord, I am just like Ted.