Lovers
Every single girl is important.
Not special, not a unique little snowflake, but still vital.
Barney ditches his scrapbook after the Abby snafu. It's too tricky, anyway. When he's drunk or tired, sometimes he forgets to snap a photo until it's too late, leaving annoying gaps that offend the part of him that's a rabid complete-ist,
He ditches his list once he reaches the magic figure of 200 woman, part of an almost-forgotten bet he made when he was a kid. It's time to put away childish things, he thinks, in order to focus on something different.
After he and Robin break up, Barney switches his attention from the women to the plays he uses to seduce them, meticulously documenting his victories as they happen. Against each play, he scrawls a name, like a tick in a checkbox, showing his steady progress against an unattainable goal.
Eventually he goes back to basics: Types of girl, nationality, places he hasn't had sex yet, keeping list after endless list, with running totals, even statistics.
He sometimes justifies all of this. Sometimes his friends press him, although these days it's increasingly rare. They are quite used to his antics, after all. Still, Barney feels that he sometimes has to give reasons, even spurious ones, as to why he'll jump into bed with so many girls, why he'll do pretty much anything to get laid.
The excuses are many and varied, sometimes even contradictory: Daddy issues, mommy issues, an addictive personaility. Narcissism, hedonism, a genuine love of the female form. Sometimes the reasons are simple, sometimes complicated and elaborate. Sometimes he even blames God, for making him this way, just too much of a man to be chained to just one woman.
On New Year's Day, he gets into an argument with Lily.
"Don't you think it's time you turned over a new leaf?" She says. "Tried dating someone? Seriously dating them, I mean. Don't make that excuse that you're controlled by your libido, Stinson! The entire time I lived with you, you never made a move on me. And you were with Robin for months!"
He scoffs at this and she accuses him of being a misogynist bastard. "No way, Aldrin," he says. "You know the reason why me and Robin broke up? Because it's her that's sexist!"
Lily shakes her head with an outraged bark of laughter. "Oh really?"
"Yeah!" He shoot back at her. "And you wanna know why?"
Lily folds her arms. "Enlighten me?"
He stands a little taller, towering over her and switching into lecture-mode. "Because as much as she wants to be a dude, and tries to act like a dude, she is actually a chick. And Scherbatsky's been brainwashed into thinking that chicks want monogamy. If she was a guy, she'd be exactly like me!" Lily opens her mouth to interrupt him, but he rushes straight on. "And she'd have be happy to keep hooking up with me on her own terms, and hook up with other guys when she needed some strange. It was you guys…" He waves an accusing finger a Lily. "You guys who forced us into that straight-jacketed, puritanical so-called relationship, which was never gonna work!"
Lily just smiles and shakes her head. "Yeah, but you still had a relationship with her. You still ditched bimbos for her, even for a little while. And don't you tell me, Barney Stinson, that being with Robin wasn't a thousand times more satisfying than being with a hundred of your vacant-eyed sluts!"
He flinches, more from her choice of words than anything. There's an anger in her voice that he's rarely seen. "Wow," he says. "Lily..." He searches her expression, his strident tone evaporating under her scornful gaze. "I never realized you were so cut up about this! I mean, Robin and me, we've been over for a couple of months now. We're good…" He trails off weakly and stands there while Lily flops onto the couch.
"I don't know, Barney. I just thought, I hoped, that after all this, you'd finally learned the difference."
This confuses him. "The difference between what?"
"Between having sex and making love," she says with a knowing smile.
He shakes his head and is silent for a moment, before adjusting his tie and heading for the door. Pausing with his fingers on the handle he turns to her and says, "It's always making love, Lil. Every time. That's the whole point. That's what being awesome means."
Then he heads out, leaving Lily lost in her own thoughts.
Every single girl is important. For the brief time he's with her, he is hers and hers alone. No one else ever seems to get that.