45 Days, or, what it's like to have an empty husk where my heart belongs.

Dear blog,

Several years ago, when my husband and I were "just good friends" (in part because I was dating somebody else at the time), he posed this question: "Do you watch How I Met Your Mother?". When I replied that not only did I not watch it, but I'd never, in fact, heard of it before, he all but insisted that I give it a shot. The way he described it, it sounded like something I'd be into, so I tuned in at the next available opportunity. And I kind of hated it. I wasn't familiar enough with its premise, I suppose, and the random episode that I first caught was one of the sports-centred ones (I think it was the one where they're all trying to avoid finding out who won the Superbowl, but I'm not positive). When I told this to my then-good-friend, current-husband, he said "No no no... start at the beginning". So I did, and it worked, and now we tune in together, week after week.

The most recent episode featured what I'm sure is going to become one of the show's defining moments, in the form of a daydream soliloquy given by Ted to his then-future wife, about how they're going to meet in 45 days, and how they'll get married and have 2 kids, and how he's going to love her for the rest of his days and beyond. Well, here's the part where you find out that I, apparently, have no heart, because I hated that speech. Like, it had me in a bad mood for the rest of the night, that kind of hatred. And if gif sets on Tumblr are anything to judge by, I stand alone in that assessment.

It's possible that, after bearing with Ted through so many false starts, I'm just set for this show to wrap up already. It's also possible that (sadly, for my husband) I have an extremely cynical opinion of love. Sorry, romantics of the world, but I'm with Summer Finn on this one; our common conceptions of "love" are about as grounded in reality as the average fairy tale. the feeling we experience as "love" is really nothing more than a potent neurochemical cocktail, and when the novelty wears off, so does the dopamine, and suddenly, "love" feels like a very different thing indeed. It becomes less about how you actually feel, I think, and more about how you assume you'd feel if the person you love was to go away.

Suffice to say, I'm not the biggest fan of anything that paints love as this all-encompassing, life-changing, undying, passionate thing, and Ted's 45 Days speech delved a little too deep into that territory for my liking. I mean, in a world where art truly does imitate life, How I Met Your Mother would launch a spinoff series entitled "Couples Therapy", because honestly, who stays married for 20 years plus without that these days?

In conclusion, I am clearly dead on the inside.