As the title indicates, How I Met Your Mother is a show about telling stories, and while the story of how the helplessly romantic Ted (Josh Radnor) met his wife, Tracy, is the guiding thread that connects all the events of the show, getting to know how every main character met each other is equally interesting.
In Season 3, Episode 5, “How I Met Everyone Else,” viewers get to see how the majority of these friendships started, when Ted and a woman referred to as “Blah Blah” come up with a fake story to make up for the awkward fact that they met online. The contrast between questionable first impressions and everlasting friendships gets as hilarious as it can get, and How I Met Your Mothers stands out as the best comedy show about the power of storytelling.
Here’s how every main character in How I Met Your Mother first met each other.
How Ted and Marshall Met
The oldest friendship in the group is the one between Ted and Marshall (Jason Segel), who met in college and immediately formed a powerful bond. They were both nerdy freshmen in their most traditional form; they were fascinated with Star Wars, had a hard time getting dates with women, and smoked way too many “sandwiches.”
In fact, their friendship began with a sandwich. On the first day of college, Marshall was way too high when he was told the dean was around, leading him to believe Ted was actually the dean and they would have to share rooms. It wasn’t until later that night that Marshall realized Ted was a student like him, and so started a beautiful friendship that never lost its strength.
How Lily Met Marshall and Ted
One of the cutest TV couples of all time, Lily (Alyson Hannigan) and Marshall have been together for so long that telling the story of how they met each other has become a choreographed dance: back when they were freshmen in college, Lily recounts being “inexplicably” drawn to room 110 in search for someone to help her set up her stereo, stumbling upon Marshall in a beautiful love-at-first-sight moment.
However, this fairy-tale story is revealed to be an innocent farse linked to a tiny detail Ted decided to omit from Marshall. The true reason Lily was drawn to room 110 was because that was the only thing she remembered from a freshman party, where she and Ted flirted and hooked up. Drunk as they were, they only remember each other as “Too-much-tongue guy” and “Unreasonably-small-mouth-opening girl,” and what really happened that night is pretty much left to the benefit of the doubt in the end.
Lily and Ted only officially met sometime after she started hanging out with Marshall and was introduced to Ted bursting into tears after his ex-girlfriend Karen broke his heart.
How Robin Met Ted and the Gang
To this day, the How I Met Your Mother fandom continues to argue about whether Ted and Robin (Cobie Smulders) or Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) and Robin are the show’s OTP couple, but there’s a reason why this story starts with the day Ted and Robin met. After all, it’s later revealed that the whole narrative about Ted’s journey until meeting Tracy was merely a pretext to ask his children whether it was okay to move on from Tracy’s death by trying something with Robin once again. For Ted, it was love at first sight when he met Robin by chance at McLaren’s Pub, which led him to impulsively say “I love you” on their first date, ruining the chance of a romance, but setting the path for a friendship.
As Ted and Robin began to see each other frequently, she was welcomed into the friend group. Lily recognized Robin from the news at McLaren’s, and the two immediately struck up a friendship. Marshall came next, and as for Barney, the two who would turn out to become a fan-favorite couple weren’t officially introduced; Robin quickly secured her place in the group with her charm and naturally became friends with everyone.
It’s clear that, in the first How I Met Your Mother season, the idea of Robin and Barney getting together was still a remote scheme in the showrunners’ minds, which explains why they didn’t explore their relationship in depth back then.
How Barney Met Everyone
As is typical of his offhand behavior, Barney kind of forced his way into Ted’s friendship circle in How I Met Your Mother. At first, he was just a guy who was always there. As they got used to his presence and his inconvenient remarks, Barney gradually became a loyal friend and someone they could count on.
Barney and Ted meet in the bathroom of MacLaren’s as Barney researches a pick-up line about his deaf brother with Ted. Barney invites himself to teach Ted how to live, and in a classic Barney move, he uses Ted as a guinea pig to get a girl, introducing him as his deaf brother. The same teaching-how-to-live story happens with Marshall, but with a hilarious twist: he chooses a girl for Marshall to hit on unaware that it’s Lily, leading him to worship Marshall like a god for a long time.
How Everyone Met the Mother
In the Season 8 finale, fans finally get a glimpse at what the titular mother looks like: she’s Tracy McConnell (Cirstin Milioti), and a good chunk of How I Met Your Mother‘s final season is an account of how everyone got to meet her before Ted. Tracy meets Lily on the train to Farhampton, while Lily is on the verge of a nervous attack, calming her with cookies and awkward jokes. She takes advantage of this encounter to play a trick on Marshall when she gives him a lift in the middle of the night, pretending to be a psychic who knows every little detail about his life. In typical Marshall fashion, he freaks out a good deal.
Tracy stumbles upon Barney when he is feeling most delusional about his relationship with Robin, and she’s the one who makes him realize Robin is the love of his life. She meets Robin in a similar situation, when Robin decides to run away from the wedding and ends up crashing into Tracy, who, hopefully, was there to soothe her and convince her to think twice about leaving the man she loves behind.
The fateful first encounter between Tracy and Ted took place in a train station shortly after Barney and Robin’s wedding. It was pouring, and as Ted took shelter in Tracy’s iconic yellow umbrella, the love story of his life begins. While that’s how the two officially met, Tracy had seen Ted before when he entered the wrong class on his first day as a college professor.
