When I think about everything I’ve learnt about love and relationships, I can’t help but hear Ted Mosby’s voice, hopeful, romantic, sometimes a little lost, but always believing.
“How I Met Your Mother” resonates with me because of how it mirrors my own experiences, the longing, the heartbreak, the laughter and the unexpected ways love and friendship shape us.
My story began long before I could define what love really meant. I was 16 when my friend and I admitted what we’d both quietly known – that our friendship had blossomed into something deeper.
It was young love, full of possibility and innocence. Three weeks later, he passed away from kidney failure. It was just four days after my own father, my first love, had died.
I had barely begun to understand what it meant to love when I learnt how to lose it. At his funeral, I remember standing there trying to be composed, to be “brave,” but hearing his voice in my heart whisper, “Dit is reg om te huil, skatebol.”
It’s okay to cry, sweetheart. That week shattered me. But it also shaped the foundation of everything I would come to understand about love, its tenderness, its fragility, and its courage.
When I recently visited his grave for the first time in 22 years, I realised how deeply I had carried that grief in silence. I was just 16, after all — what did I know about real love? But I did know.
The love and respect I received from my father and my first boyfriend set a high bar for how I understood connection and care.
For a long time, I thought I was too picky about love. Too cautious. Too careful. But what I was really doing was trying to stay safe, seeking relationships that felt familiar, that reminded me of home, with the understanding that it can be taken away from me at any given moment.
Maybe that’s why How I Met Your Mother has always struck such a chord with me. Like Ted, I’ve been idealistic, searching for a grand love story and sometimes missing what’s right in front of me.
Like Robin, I’ve been ambitious and guarded, pushing people away when love got too close. There were seasons where I was Barney, playful, uncommitted, convinced I couldn’t be tied down.
For many years, I was Lilly, nurturing, grounded, in a decade-long relationship that felt like a marriage in every way but the paperwork.
Beyond romantic love, the series taught me a lot about friendship too. Ted, Robin, Barney, Marshall and Lilly navigated love, heartbreak and growing up together.
They held each other accountable, showed up in crises and never stopped rooting for each other, even when life pulled them in different directions.
That mirrors my own circle of friends from back home in Kimberley, most of whom I met in high school. Over the years, we’ve seen each other through love, loss, parenthood and reinvention.
No matter where we are in the world, that bond remains. Like the How I Met Your Mother gang, our friendship has been the safe place where laughter, truth and belonging always meet.
Still, I know my next great love story won’t come from my friendship circles. That chapter has passed.
As I approach a year and six months single, I’m learning that the relationship I’ve been waiting for all along is the one with myself.
Self-love, I’ve discovered, is the quiet, steady kind. It’s choosing yourself again and again, not out of arrogance, but because you understand your worth.
It’s standing in front of the mirror, embracing the person you’ve become, the one who has survived loss, loved deeply, and continues to hope.
It’s like pouring into your own cup before offering what’s left to others. It’s being kind, even when the world has been unkind to you.
Yes, companionship is beautiful. It’s comforting to walk through life with someone who knows your rhythm.
But I’ve learned that I’m of no use to anyone – not my son, not my friends, not a future partner – if I don’t nurture the love I have for myself first.
Because in the end, every relationship, romantic or platonic, begins and ends with how we show up for ourselves.
Maybe that’s the real love story here.
Not how I met someone else, but how I finally met me.