In the fall of 2005, CBS premiered the creation of Craig Thomas and Carter Bays, a sitcom headlined by ex-Doogie Neil Patrick Harris and Buffy's right-hand gal Alyson Hannigan, with a cast of relatively unknown actors. The premise of the show? The burden has been placed upon the shoulders of future Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) to tell his children the story of how he met their mother. The wildly hilarious and popular sitcom appealed – and still appeals – to the simple concept of love, and how Ted Mosby searches for his future wife. Told in hindsight, future Ted tells a story of life imitating art, and art imitating life; a magical realist account, à la Latin American literature, of living and loving in a post-modern world.
Let's look far beyond the comedy, though, shall we? There are several major themes in "How I Met Your Mother," one being Ted's fixation on his and his future wife's favorite book, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. As the series develops, Ted contracts a classic case of life imitating art – Cholera if you will. Ted starts assuming the struggles of the novel's tragic protagonist Florentino Ariza and obsesses over finding "the one." Each new episode veers off in different directions, chronicling the lives of Ted's friends and the significant moments in his life, seemingly getting no closer to his future wife. Future Ted's tangential tale of his life, however, is simply a pretext – the means to the end. But these episodic asides and allusions are what embodies Ted's story – and for that matter Marquez's book; it's what places them in the realm of magical realism, and what keeps the kids watching.
In the episode titled "No Pressure" late in season seven, Ted narrates: "Kids, I'll never forget the first time I told your mother I loved her," under her yellow umbrella as it was pouring rain outside a movie theater. It's no accident on the part of the writers, who named “Wedding Bride III” as the marquee film. In its three distinct pieces, "Wedding Bride" parallels the three serious relationships in Ted's life – Stella, Victoria, and Zoey. We leave out, of course, Robin, because in this episode, Ted expresses his love to Robin for the last time. In the words of Marquez, Ted "was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past." Much like Florentino Ariza's inability to forget his obsession Fermina Daza in "Love in the Time of Cholera," Robin is the memory that Ted can't let go of.
Throughout the series, Ted struggles to put aside the idea of what he thinks love should be, rather than what love is. He is constantly too focused on the grand romantic gesture, the stealing of Smurf penises and blue string quartets. He concentrates too much on rewriting Pablo Neruda's sonnets and doesn't spend enough time performing "The Naked Man." (Heck, it works two out of three times. It's a wonder Barney is getting married before him.) Ted's love for Robin, as Marquez puts it, "was nothing more than an illusion."
This illusion distracted Ted from seeing the yellow umbrella, the recurring symbol for his ever-elusive future wife. In a moment similar to when Fermina Daza's father makes her leave the city to forget Florentino Ariza, Marshall tells Robin that she must move out of the apartment and out of Ted's line of vision. The door must be closed so he can see the yellow umbrella.
For too long, Ted has been obsessed with the story of how he meets his wife, like when he dated Blah Blah. She was desperate to "beat" the story of how Marshall and Lily met. The story of how Ted met Robin was so romantic that she had to be "the one." But because he spends his life imitating art – ie his favorite magical realist novels – he just forgets to let his love story happen. Alas, when Ted meets crazy Jeanette on the subway, they are both reading Marquez's other great novel, 100 years of Solitude, a metaphor for the solitude that Ted must endure. "It's always darkest before the dawn," and he must be okay with being alone and being just Ted. (That sounds like a good thing for future Ted to deal with.)
So finally, as future Ted narrates, "When one door closes, another one opens," Ted walks out of MacLaren's into a downpour of rain and emotion. While Florence + the Machine weeps that "It's hard to dance with the devil on your back," Ted pops open his umbrella to endless possibilities and a street full of yellow umbrellas walking past him. Any one of them could be "the one," anyone could be the yellow umbrella.
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