The show's REAL love story: Ted and... Lily?
(This one's for idioticonion, who requested a Ted/Lily theory as research for her AU fic.)
Part of what makes HIMYM so enjoyable is observing the relationships that make up the show, both romantic and platonic. Over four seasons, we’ve all fallen in love with Marshall-and-Lily, Robin-and-Barney, Ted-and-Your-Mother, and so many others. But out of all 10 possible character combinations, one of them could be a secret, subtexty love story between two rather unlikely characters, fraught with complications of unrequited love and involvement by other parties. I’m speaking, of course, of the relationship between Ted and Lily.
Yes, you read that correctly. Do not attempt to change the settings on your monitors.
Ted/Lily might be considered the redheaded stepchild of all relationships on HIMYM, as it barely gets any screentime (the last time it was given any sort of mention, as I recall, was waaaaaay back in "How I Met Everyone Else"). In fact, out of all possible combinations of characters, it seems only Marshall/Robin has been given less screentime (but that’s another post). But the little time it does get highlights the deep relationship Ted and Lily have, which just might run a little deeper than something that's just platonic. Might.
Now, I'm not saying this pairing will ever happen. In fact, there's too much evidence against the Ted/Lily pairing to make it ever fully appear as a canon romance. The greatest arguments against this pairing would be the fact that he calls her "Aunt Lily" for his kids; that he met her YEARS before the show begins, so the show could hardly be called How I Met Your Mother if Lily was the Mother... and, oh yeah, the small matter of the not-so-small Marshall Eriksen, who Lily is clearly shown as married to in the 2029 flashforward, and who she is clearly very happy with in both the present and future. Aly and Josh do have wonderful chemistry together (in my opinion, at least), but the entire cast clicks well, so that isn't saying much. On a personal note, I will say that I am a huge fan of the relationship Lily has with Marshall, and would be terribly upset if anything happened to ruin it.
So just what would make me say that Lily and Ted would or could be anything more than friends, other than massive amounts of illegal substances?
Well... this, for starters.
Damn, it's too blurry to read. Anyway, this screencap comes from the TelevisionWithoutPity message boards, from the really, really old HIMYM thread, dating back from summer 2005. (You can see the page this particular post appears on here, and the post itself is a little ways down the screen.) The post I highlighted is dated 19 Sept 2005 at around 9:10 EST or so (in other words, about 10 minutes after the pilot finished airing on the East Coast). And what does it say?
"I'm absolutely convinced that Ted is marrying the Alyson Hannigan character."
That's right. Lily was the first Mother candidate, at least in the eyes of some fans. (That is, if you don't count Robin, which I don't, as she was discounted by the end of the pilot with the words "Aunt Robin". I'm still not sure exactly when Ted first called Lily "Aunt Lily," but it certainly wasn't in the pilot.) Ted/Lily fans were few and far between, even back then when there was less evidence against them, but they were there, and they were speaking out. Lily might have already gotten engaged to Marshall, but viewers were sensing some Lily/Ted sparks. In fact, I don't believe that Craig and Carter have ever explicitly denied the idea that Lily might be the Mother (as they have with Robin). Maybe they didn't think I'd figure it out. But I got you, Craig and Carter! You can't fool me! I go to college!!!
(What would you call this ship, anyway? Tily? Led? This pair's so rare, it doesn't even have some cutesy thing where their names are fused together. Anyway.)
---
If there was ever foreshadowing that Lily would dump Marshall and be with Ted, it would be in another early episode, "Okay Awesome." In the cab scene at the very end, Marshall and Ted are having a loud conversation, as they have gone deaf, but that isn't important. Let's see what Lily does in this scene. She starts out asleep on Marshall's shoulder.
She wakes up panicked, thinks she's going to barf, then goes back to sleep on Marshall's shoulder, saying "No, I'm okay." I'm going to take this as a parallel to her trip to San Francisco: she freaks out about marrying Marshall and not getting to experience other things, so she leaves him temporarily, but then comes back to him, partly because they miss each other so much and because they really do love each other, but also partly because of how comfortable they've gotten with one another. And when you wake up suddenly, you want to return to how comfortable you felt when you were asleep.
And THEN, at the very, very end of the scene, she switches to Ted's shoulder while she's still asleep. Ted glances at Marshall, who gives him a small sort of nod that lets him know he thinks it's okay (awesome).
Could it possibly be that at the very end of the series, Lily and Ted will get together, and Marshall will somehow be okay with it? Maybe, after the 2029 scene we get in "We're Not From Here", Lily and Marshall will get a divorce just after Ted has divorced his own wife (or maybe she's dead or something), and he'll get together with Lily, thus causing him to have to explain to his kids, using agonizing detail and going off on far too many tangents, just WHY he is marrying the woman they know as Aunt Lily, who is actually their STEPmother but he wants them to call her Mom now?!?
Whoa, dude. Head trip.
If my above explanation turns out to be true, it would excuse any usage of the name "Aunt Lily" (which I can't find anywhere in the first five episodes, though I'm positive it comes up at some point - damn you, Saget!). The kids would know Lily as Aunt Lily because they grew up with that kind of relationship with the woman who is now their mother (or at least, married to their father).
You Ted/Robin fans (hi, the five of you out there!) might scoff at this, saying my explanation could be applied to Robin far more easily, as she and Ted have a history and she's not, you know, already tied down to another beloved character. (Yet.) But really, aren't Ted and Lily a bit more compatible then Ted and Robin are? Their history is just as long as Marshall's is with Lily, so they have a very intimate understanding of one another. Lily's been shown to be extremely supportive of Ted: in "Aldrin Justice," she gives him the courage to stand up to Druthers and is ultimately the person who persuades him to show off his design for the building. (Yeah, Robin might have seen it first, but Ted later tells Lily that she's the reason he got the job.) They also have similar life goals of marriage and children - they even both want two kids! (Marshall wants four, something Lily doesn't seem to agree with whenever the subject of number of kids comes up.) Whether Lily would agree to naming her kids Luke and Leia is up for debate, though she does seem to at least be a Star Wars fan as well (something Stella didn't live up to).
And Ted just miiiiiiight be kind of in love with Lily.
Maybe. A little.
---
Ted might not consciously want Lily at all. I think it's far more likely that Ted has been using Lily as a template for the wife he's spent the series looking for. After all, her engagement to Marshall is what gets him started on his search for a wife, since he doesn't want to get left behind. He clearly admires their relationship and is hoping to emulate it as soon as possible. (Perhaps part of what led to him telling Robin he loved her in the pilot was how neatly the two of them fit into the Olive Theory.) Ted wants to find his own Lily (but probably not necessarily THE Lily) so he and Marshall can continue to bro out, married-style, having badass wine tastings and the like without him having to feel like the third wheel.
But Ted's clearly attracted to Lily in some way, and I'm not entirely convinced it's all platonic. Whether this is because he's trying to find a girl to have the role in his life that she has in Marshall's, or if he really wants Lily herself, I'm not sure. But there's undeniably something there.
Let's not forget the infamous "grinch" calling in "How Lily Stole Christmas". Ted claims that he called Lily that word to Marshall in order to help him get over her. But... name-calling didn't really seem to help Marshall any. (Pointing out her flaws helped a bit, but the show showed us that time was the only thing that seemed to heal Marshall from the breakup at all.) If characters' reactions to "grinch" is any indication to what it means, it's clearly a terrible word to call a woman; Ted would have had to be furious at her to call her that at all. He later tells us the real reason he called her a grinch: because when she went to SF, she left him, not just Marshall, as he says in the dialogue below:
Lily: I've apologized to Marshall, and he's forgiven me, and we've moved past it. Why can't you?
Ted: Because you never apologized to me. (Lily looks surprised) Marshall's not the only one you walked out on. You leave for three months, you don't even call... come on, Lily, we're supposed to be friends!
Lily: Yeah, some friend, you called me a grinch!
Ted: (exploding) You WERE a grinch!
Anger at a friend abandoning you is completely understandable. But then, why doesn't Robin have a similar scene with Lily? When she first sees Lily upon her return, the first words out of her mouth are "Your hair looks fantastic!" That's all the reaction Robin ever has to the fact that Lily left them. Barney's the one who convinces her to come back, and while he doesn't seem particularly happy with her he doesn't seem angry at her for just up and leaving in the first place either. As for Marshall... he's too happy she's back to blow up at her at all, though he does end up hurting her back by rejecting her in "The Scorpion and the Toad." But none of the others in the group are angry enough to call Lily horrible names to her face, six months later, the way Ted does. Ted isn't generally an angry person - he even says that the "Buckeye way" of dealing with anger and hurt is to repress it. So why does he act like this?
Also, is it even worth mentioning that the other subtexty couple on the show, Barney and Robin, get their own story in this episode? Well, I mentioned it anyway.
Oh, and let's not forget the way the two of them reacted when they thought they had made out back in college, as we see in "How I Met Everyone Else".
Ted was the one who was convinced he'd made out with Lily, but he told BlahBlah to keep her mouth shut to spare Marshall's feelings. Lily, on the other hand, ends up letting Ted convince her that it had happened, and she wants to come clean to Marshall right away.
Ooh, and here are the faces they make in that scene: Ted's face is saying "Yeah, Lil, you remember and you liked it."
Lily's, meanwhile, is saying "Oh my God, I can't believe I once made out with my husband's best friend." It's obviously a horrifying thought for her. See?
Even after they establish that they hadn't made out with each other that night, Ted remained convinced that they had, and he stayed absolutely convinced for THIRTEEN YEARS AFTER THAT, keeping his mouth shut only because he wants to preserve the magical story of how Marshall and Lily met. What's more, he looks and sounds crestfallen when he tells BlahBlah that he must have made a mistake, keeping his sad eyes on Marshall and Lily (who are making out) the whole time. (He sounds sadder than he looks, really, but I can't take a screencap of Josh Radnor's line inflection, now can I?)
So he says that he made a mistake, but he clearly doesn't believe it. But rather than casually try to play it off, he sounds a bit... dare I say disappointed? I think he was trying to hold on to any shred of their relationship that was more than platonic, because whether he consciously knows it or not, Ted definitely has a bit of a thing for Lily. It's equally clear, however, that she does not feel the same way about him, regarding him as one of her best friends, but nothing more.
While we're on the subject, how DID Ted and Lily really meet? Well, right after CollegeTed finishes leaving his long-distance girlfriend an apologetic voicemail (for the makeoutz the night before), Marshall and Lily walk in:
Marshall: Ted, this is Lily.
Ted: (leaving quickly) No, no, I'm sorry, but I love Karen!
He clearly mistook Lily for a girl Marshall was trying to set him up with. I wonder why? (meaningful look)
---
But as I said at the very beginning, this relationship will probably never appear in canon. Even suggesting that it will is kind of ridiculous at this point, since so much has happened since the first few episodes (where much of the evidence for their relationship comes from anyway). Lily's relationship with Marshall is now too strong (and too beloved) to let another man come between them, especially a man they've been friends with for like, twelve years. If Ted ever becomes consciously aware of his romantic love for Lily, he's unlikely to do anything about it, in order to respect Marshall and because of his whole repression dealie. Unlike another subtexty relationship that recently became canon, this one will likely never see the light of day on the show.
But that's what fandoms were created for, isn't it? =)
Part of what makes HIMYM so enjoyable is observing the relationships that make up the show, both romantic and platonic. Over four seasons, we’ve all fallen in love with Marshall-and-Lily, Robin-and-Barney, Ted-and-Your-Mother, and so many others. But out of all 10 possible character combinations, one of them could be a secret, subtexty love story between two rather unlikely characters, fraught with complications of unrequited love and involvement by other parties. I’m speaking, of course, of the relationship between Ted and Lily.
Yes, you read that correctly. Do not attempt to change the settings on your monitors.
Ted/Lily might be considered the redheaded stepchild of all relationships on HIMYM, as it barely gets any screentime (the last time it was given any sort of mention, as I recall, was waaaaaay back in "How I Met Everyone Else"). In fact, out of all possible combinations of characters, it seems only Marshall/Robin has been given less screentime (but that’s another post). But the little time it does get highlights the deep relationship Ted and Lily have, which just might run a little deeper than something that's just platonic. Might.
Now, I'm not saying this pairing will ever happen. In fact, there's too much evidence against the Ted/Lily pairing to make it ever fully appear as a canon romance. The greatest arguments against this pairing would be the fact that he calls her "Aunt Lily" for his kids; that he met her YEARS before the show begins, so the show could hardly be called How I Met Your Mother if Lily was the Mother... and, oh yeah, the small matter of the not-so-small Marshall Eriksen, who Lily is clearly shown as married to in the 2029 flashforward, and who she is clearly very happy with in both the present and future. Aly and Josh do have wonderful chemistry together (in my opinion, at least), but the entire cast clicks well, so that isn't saying much. On a personal note, I will say that I am a huge fan of the relationship Lily has with Marshall, and would be terribly upset if anything happened to ruin it.
So just what would make me say that Lily and Ted would or could be anything more than friends, other than massive amounts of illegal substances?
Well... this, for starters.
Damn, it's too blurry to read. Anyway, this screencap comes from the TelevisionWithoutPity message boards, from the really, really old HIMYM thread, dating back from summer 2005. (You can see the page this particular post appears on here, and the post itself is a little ways down the screen.) The post I highlighted is dated 19 Sept 2005 at around 9:10 EST or so (in other words, about 10 minutes after the pilot finished airing on the East Coast). And what does it say?
"I'm absolutely convinced that Ted is marrying the Alyson Hannigan character."
That's right. Lily was the first Mother candidate, at least in the eyes of some fans. (That is, if you don't count Robin, which I don't, as she was discounted by the end of the pilot with the words "Aunt Robin". I'm still not sure exactly when Ted first called Lily "Aunt Lily," but it certainly wasn't in the pilot.) Ted/Lily fans were few and far between, even back then when there was less evidence against them, but they were there, and they were speaking out. Lily might have already gotten engaged to Marshall, but viewers were sensing some Lily/Ted sparks. In fact, I don't believe that Craig and Carter have ever explicitly denied the idea that Lily might be the Mother (as they have with Robin). Maybe they didn't think I'd figure it out. But I got you, Craig and Carter! You can't fool me! I go to college!!!
(What would you call this ship, anyway? Tily? Led? This pair's so rare, it doesn't even have some cutesy thing where their names are fused together. Anyway.)
---
If there was ever foreshadowing that Lily would dump Marshall and be with Ted, it would be in another early episode, "Okay Awesome." In the cab scene at the very end, Marshall and Ted are having a loud conversation, as they have gone deaf, but that isn't important. Let's see what Lily does in this scene. She starts out asleep on Marshall's shoulder.
She wakes up panicked, thinks she's going to barf, then goes back to sleep on Marshall's shoulder, saying "No, I'm okay." I'm going to take this as a parallel to her trip to San Francisco: she freaks out about marrying Marshall and not getting to experience other things, so she leaves him temporarily, but then comes back to him, partly because they miss each other so much and because they really do love each other, but also partly because of how comfortable they've gotten with one another. And when you wake up suddenly, you want to return to how comfortable you felt when you were asleep.
And THEN, at the very, very end of the scene, she switches to Ted's shoulder while she's still asleep. Ted glances at Marshall, who gives him a small sort of nod that lets him know he thinks it's okay (awesome).
Could it possibly be that at the very end of the series, Lily and Ted will get together, and Marshall will somehow be okay with it? Maybe, after the 2029 scene we get in "We're Not From Here", Lily and Marshall will get a divorce just after Ted has divorced his own wife (or maybe she's dead or something), and he'll get together with Lily, thus causing him to have to explain to his kids, using agonizing detail and going off on far too many tangents, just WHY he is marrying the woman they know as Aunt Lily, who is actually their STEPmother but he wants them to call her Mom now?!?
Whoa, dude. Head trip.
If my above explanation turns out to be true, it would excuse any usage of the name "Aunt Lily" (which I can't find anywhere in the first five episodes, though I'm positive it comes up at some point - damn you, Saget!). The kids would know Lily as Aunt Lily because they grew up with that kind of relationship with the woman who is now their mother (or at least, married to their father).
You Ted/Robin fans (hi, the five of you out there!) might scoff at this, saying my explanation could be applied to Robin far more easily, as she and Ted have a history and she's not, you know, already tied down to another beloved character. (Yet.) But really, aren't Ted and Lily a bit more compatible then Ted and Robin are? Their history is just as long as Marshall's is with Lily, so they have a very intimate understanding of one another. Lily's been shown to be extremely supportive of Ted: in "Aldrin Justice," she gives him the courage to stand up to Druthers and is ultimately the person who persuades him to show off his design for the building. (Yeah, Robin might have seen it first, but Ted later tells Lily that she's the reason he got the job.) They also have similar life goals of marriage and children - they even both want two kids! (Marshall wants four, something Lily doesn't seem to agree with whenever the subject of number of kids comes up.) Whether Lily would agree to naming her kids Luke and Leia is up for debate, though she does seem to at least be a Star Wars fan as well (something Stella didn't live up to).
And Ted just miiiiiiight be kind of in love with Lily.
Maybe. A little.
---
Ted might not consciously want Lily at all. I think it's far more likely that Ted has been using Lily as a template for the wife he's spent the series looking for. After all, her engagement to Marshall is what gets him started on his search for a wife, since he doesn't want to get left behind. He clearly admires their relationship and is hoping to emulate it as soon as possible. (Perhaps part of what led to him telling Robin he loved her in the pilot was how neatly the two of them fit into the Olive Theory.) Ted wants to find his own Lily (but probably not necessarily THE Lily) so he and Marshall can continue to bro out, married-style, having badass wine tastings and the like without him having to feel like the third wheel.
But Ted's clearly attracted to Lily in some way, and I'm not entirely convinced it's all platonic. Whether this is because he's trying to find a girl to have the role in his life that she has in Marshall's, or if he really wants Lily herself, I'm not sure. But there's undeniably something there.
Let's not forget the infamous "grinch" calling in "How Lily Stole Christmas". Ted claims that he called Lily that word to Marshall in order to help him get over her. But... name-calling didn't really seem to help Marshall any. (Pointing out her flaws helped a bit, but the show showed us that time was the only thing that seemed to heal Marshall from the breakup at all.) If characters' reactions to "grinch" is any indication to what it means, it's clearly a terrible word to call a woman; Ted would have had to be furious at her to call her that at all. He later tells us the real reason he called her a grinch: because when she went to SF, she left him, not just Marshall, as he says in the dialogue below:
Lily: I've apologized to Marshall, and he's forgiven me, and we've moved past it. Why can't you?
Ted: Because you never apologized to me. (Lily looks surprised) Marshall's not the only one you walked out on. You leave for three months, you don't even call... come on, Lily, we're supposed to be friends!
Lily: Yeah, some friend, you called me a grinch!
Ted: (exploding) You WERE a grinch!
Anger at a friend abandoning you is completely understandable. But then, why doesn't Robin have a similar scene with Lily? When she first sees Lily upon her return, the first words out of her mouth are "Your hair looks fantastic!" That's all the reaction Robin ever has to the fact that Lily left them. Barney's the one who convinces her to come back, and while he doesn't seem particularly happy with her he doesn't seem angry at her for just up and leaving in the first place either. As for Marshall... he's too happy she's back to blow up at her at all, though he does end up hurting her back by rejecting her in "The Scorpion and the Toad." But none of the others in the group are angry enough to call Lily horrible names to her face, six months later, the way Ted does. Ted isn't generally an angry person - he even says that the "Buckeye way" of dealing with anger and hurt is to repress it. So why does he act like this?
Also, is it even worth mentioning that the other subtexty couple on the show, Barney and Robin, get their own story in this episode? Well, I mentioned it anyway.
Oh, and let's not forget the way the two of them reacted when they thought they had made out back in college, as we see in "How I Met Everyone Else".
Ted was the one who was convinced he'd made out with Lily, but he told BlahBlah to keep her mouth shut to spare Marshall's feelings. Lily, on the other hand, ends up letting Ted convince her that it had happened, and she wants to come clean to Marshall right away.
Ooh, and here are the faces they make in that scene: Ted's face is saying "Yeah, Lil, you remember and you liked it."
Lily's, meanwhile, is saying "Oh my God, I can't believe I once made out with my husband's best friend." It's obviously a horrifying thought for her. See?
Even after they establish that they hadn't made out with each other that night, Ted remained convinced that they had, and he stayed absolutely convinced for THIRTEEN YEARS AFTER THAT, keeping his mouth shut only because he wants to preserve the magical story of how Marshall and Lily met. What's more, he looks and sounds crestfallen when he tells BlahBlah that he must have made a mistake, keeping his sad eyes on Marshall and Lily (who are making out) the whole time. (He sounds sadder than he looks, really, but I can't take a screencap of Josh Radnor's line inflection, now can I?)
So he says that he made a mistake, but he clearly doesn't believe it. But rather than casually try to play it off, he sounds a bit... dare I say disappointed? I think he was trying to hold on to any shred of their relationship that was more than platonic, because whether he consciously knows it or not, Ted definitely has a bit of a thing for Lily. It's equally clear, however, that she does not feel the same way about him, regarding him as one of her best friends, but nothing more.
While we're on the subject, how DID Ted and Lily really meet? Well, right after CollegeTed finishes leaving his long-distance girlfriend an apologetic voicemail (for the makeoutz the night before), Marshall and Lily walk in:
Marshall: Ted, this is Lily.
Ted: (leaving quickly) No, no, I'm sorry, but I love Karen!
He clearly mistook Lily for a girl Marshall was trying to set him up with. I wonder why? (meaningful look)
---
But as I said at the very beginning, this relationship will probably never appear in canon. Even suggesting that it will is kind of ridiculous at this point, since so much has happened since the first few episodes (where much of the evidence for their relationship comes from anyway). Lily's relationship with Marshall is now too strong (and too beloved) to let another man come between them, especially a man they've been friends with for like, twelve years. If Ted ever becomes consciously aware of his romantic love for Lily, he's unlikely to do anything about it, in order to respect Marshall and because of his whole repression dealie. Unlike another subtexty relationship that recently became canon, this one will likely never see the light of day on the show.
But that's what fandoms were created for, isn't it? =)