Pushing.

I've been watching How I Met Your Mother a lot lately, but in all the seven seasons that have aired, I have only one favourite from Ted's many, many, many conquests. Victoria. aka Buttercup aka the baking lady aka the lady that Ted met at the wedding in season 1, ep 12/13/14.

I will always be vouching for Victoria and Ted to end up together, and even though I know there's no possibility of that happening now, (sometime in a later season, she comes back and she's engaged), there's a tiny part of me that still hopes.

Why? Why do I invest so much hope in a fictional character finding love and a happy ending with another fictional character? Partly because I have no life of my own. But mostly, its because she's epitomises the kind of woman I'd like to be. Creative, fun, spontaneous, mysterious, baking delicious cupcakes and finding the most sweetest, purest, most romantic of loves.

Anyways the title of this post is "pushing" not "Victoria", even though it was inspired by her and Ted's storyline. We all chase this idea of happy ever after, but often we end up pushing ourselves until we reach breaking point. And something that started so sweet, and pure, like Victoria and Ted's relationship, eventually breaks down.

So how do we know? How do we know when to quit? When is the optimal time to stay in a certain place before all hell breaks loose and it all becomes irreparable? There's that saying "quit while you're ahead," but that's the trick of good things. Good things are good, and hence you want more and more of it but the more you ask for it, the more you push and the closer you get to ruining it and losing it all.

But knowing this, why don't we stop? If we know that all things will eventually go bad, why don't we stop? Because we hope. We hope things won't go bad, we hope the happiness, the joy, the success will last forever, and we hope that it'll all work out.

 What are we, without hope?