How I Annoyed the Audience

I’ve been watching How I Met Your Mother and I’ve come to a conclusion: I really don’t like Lily. Spoiler alert for the forthcoming rant if you haven’t seen the series. It’s really quite funny until some point in season 4 when it jumps the shark.

First, she was having world class doubts about her impending marriage to her sweetheart since freshman year of college. She ignored those doubts until she tried for a scholarship to study art and didn’t tell her fiancée. If she got the scholarship, she would have to cancel her wedding. At first she just wanted to know if she could do it and then it became.

When given a choice of staying and marrying the man she was in love with, her “soulmate,” and spending a summer in San Francisco to try and be an artist, she left him. She destroyed him. When things didn’t go her way, she came back to New York and expected pick up where she left off. She barely even apologized.

I’ve never forgiven her for this because if the roles were reversed, I would never have taken her back. I don’t think she deserved to get Marshall back because she lied to him, didn’t talk to him about her doubts, and wasn’t honest with him or herself about how she needed some time on her own to figure out who she was without him. Instead, she went ahead with planning a wedding only to bail out. I get her needing to figure out who she is. What I don’t get is how selfishly she went about it. If she didn’t get into her program, her “soulmate” was her back-up plan.

When Marshall doesn’t take her back and decides he has to know who he is without her, she’s dejected. How could he not want her back? When he finally has a date with another woman, Lily mildly stalks the woman and breaks into Marshall’s apartment to spy on them. Does Marshall call the cops? Nope. This motivates him to finally take her back. No accounting for taste or gullibility.

Secondly, we find out in a later season she has been deliberately sabotaging Ted’s relationships if she didn’t like the girl or think it would work out. Her reason? “I don’t see all of us sitting on a porch together in our 80s.” WTF are you on woman?

When it comes to a relationship you’re not in, your opinion doesn’t matter. Pulling other people’s strings and orchestrating other peoples’ lives to they turn out how you want is incredibly selfish and manipulative. It borders on a personality disorder. But does Ted disown her as a friend? Nope.

All Lily has to do is one gesture and all of her years of lying and puppet-mastery are forgotten. Suddenly, she’s trustworthy again. Are you effing kidding me? If I found out one of my closest friends was deliberately sabotaging my relationships with guys she didn’t like, we wouldn’t be friends anymore. She doesn’t respect my feelings or my right to make up my own mind romantically.

Thirdly, when Robin and Barney are in the midst of their messed up pseudo-relationship, Lily decides they’re not really happy because they don’t have a label on it. These are two grown, independent adults who don’t need anyone’s permission to have or not have a relationship. But the Supreme Ruler of the Ultimate Couple decides they must label it. She even locks them in a room to make sure they do it. If she’s not satisfied with the label they assign, they won’t be released.

Again, these are two consenting adults with more issues than National Geographic. If they want to be in a fucked up wannabe relationship, that’s their choice and their right. It’s your right as a friend to be a broken record or just enjoy the show. If one person wants a label and the other doesn’t then work that into your monologue.

It is not your right to lock them in a room because they’re not doing what you want or think all couples should do. This is seriously not right and there is something diagnosably wrong with a person who pulls this and thinks it’s OK.

She also browbeats her husband. Didn’t like his browser history? Silent treatment. Didn’t like the way he was coaching kindergarten basketball? Silent treatment and threats. Rack up a huge amount of credit card debt? Lie to your husband about it, make him take a soul-sucking corporate job to pay for your mistake, and refuse to sell your designer clothes to pay for necessary repairs to the apartment you can barely afford.

It just elaborates what I already knew: What makes for good TV/Movies makes for a miserable reality. Would you want a wife who lies to you about how she feels and racks up a ton of credit card debt? Would you want a friend who sabotages your relationships because they don’t like the guy/girl? Me either but some of it makes for a decent sitcom.

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