Season 1, Episode 4 (Return of the Shirt)

LVL 10 Good Guy Blog (How I Met Your Mother Read Along) Season 1, Episode 4 (Return of the Shirt)

The Return of the Shirt

In this episode. Ted finds an old shirt. The shirt represents his changing life tastes. I think most people can relate to this change in their late twenties and thirties. The group encourages him to revisit girls he previously dated. I did this almost immediately even though I was heart broken. I was filled with this overwhelming panic to find someone. I looked up my last girlfriend. Let's call her Mika, a girl who dumped me because she was going off to another college and didn't want to commit but later spent years wanting me because she thought she had made a mistake. She married in 2013. Check.

Next, I knew my first college girlfriend had married in 2009. We remain friendly to this day. In fact, I'm still friends with all my exes. Finally, I looked up Mona who was a high school girlfriend that cheated on me with my best friend and then got dumped by him when he got her best friend pregnant. Mona contacted me in 2010 but I was married. I caught up with her at that time through messages to find out what had become of her. I told my wife about it. She had divorced and I think she was reaching out to me because she was going through what i'm now going through. I get it. 

Ted revisits a girl he broke up because he has this theory that his taste had changed over time but as they rekindle he realizes that she's not the one.  Mona is like the old shirt for me in that I like the idea of what could have been but things happened and as I followed her Facebook I realized that she would annoy the crap out of me. All that was left was the fantasy.

My wife and I grew apart many years ago so much so that we lived entirely different lives in the same house. I never held her hand, gave her a kind word, and sexual frustration led me to blow her off. From reading the logs, I know what happened in the final days. She reconnected to her first boyfriend, a cousin in Mexico. Her cousin sweet talked her and she fell for it. She needed that so bad that it awoke passion in her. She used that strength to leave me. I get it because I hoped for that years ago. The 57 pages of logs reveal that my wife and subsequent divorce is a huge accomplishment for him. He laughed at the fact that he stole another man's wife. Subsequent logs shows that my wife has a fantasy of running away from her life in the United States, where she is a professional to Mexico, with a guy who sells gum and ice cream. I know I shouldn't care because its not my responsibility but I don't think it will turn out well. She deserves her dream but with a good guy.

At the conclusion of the episode, Ted talks about the upside of hurt. The girl he dated then dumped married a year later. I am hurt. I am trying to stay afloat. I live my life as if I was dying because of illness. This is something we'll talk about later. I promised myself to live my bucket list because I may very well be living the bucket list. My wife was trapped in living some formulaic lifestyle that included career, marriage, and kids. It drove her insane. Me? I'm happy living a mininmalist lifestyle as long as I have the right woman in my life. She's home. Not the car, the house, or the job. With her I can do anything. I don't think the return of the shirt fits my situation. I am in my mid thirties. I look forward to rediscovering people with a brand new set of eyes. Hopefully, I can grow up to become the man I want to be.