Spoilers for all of Ted Lasso (seasons 1 & 2).
TW: Repeated mention of Ted's dad's passing. (One mention of how it happened.) Repeated mention of panic attacks.
Also posted on AO3 under my user r_n_g_are_dead.
Thank you so much for reading! Comments are wholeheartedly appreciated.
Ted Lasso didn't always have a mustache, even as an adult.
Though, as an adult, he wasn't sure he would always continue to have one. But, for the time being, he needed it.
When he was in his early teens, his father taught him how to shave. It was a rite of passage and something that was imprinted on young men as the way things should be. It wasn't a law, but it may as well have been: Your dad would teach you how to be a man—shave, drive, use tools, etc.
Shaving was easy enough after learning he had to be more patient while doing it. His dad told him to go slow and to mind the curve of his chin and that area between his nose and lips. Don't rush or you'll pull at your skin too much and cause red marks or even bleed. It only took one round of Ted thinking he knew what he was doing and ending up with bits of toilet paper all over his face and neck to stop the tiny beads of blood he had drawn from not taking his time for him from then on out to take care and appreciate the process. Because it was a process, as most things in his life would be.
Ted's dad didn't have a prominent mustache or beard. He would shave on weekdays but on weekends let the scruff come in. Come Monday morning when he left for work, he would have a clean face again.
Years before he learned to shave, Ted learned how to play darts. At 10, he was a bit too young to be accompanying his dad to a sports bar every Sunday afternoon, but it was the '80s and that kind of thing was somehow allowed by society and the proprietor of the bar. Ted would be given a root beer every time his dad was given an actual beer, so while there was no caffeine in his beverage there was enough sugar to give the young boy a near-manic burst of energy.
To get Ted to focus while his dad and his dad's friends were watching football on the bar's television, Ted was shown how to play darts. It required keeping his eye on the dartboard, precision throwing the darts, and math skills to keep score. Learning while playing was always a bonus in the Lasso house. If doing something fun could help little Ted get a leg up somehow, then that was something to celebrate.
So, Ted played darts every Sunday for years. In those same years, he would eventually learn how to use tools from his dad's toolbox to help out around the house. It was a little tricky teaching a left handed kid how to use a hammer, but his dad figured it out. Ted learned "righty tighty, lefty loosey" with a screwdriver alongside the birds and the bees when he would have "man chats" with his dad, as learning while working was always a bonus in the Lasso house too.
They fixed up what eventually would be Ted's first car while Ted asked his dad everything he had heard from other kids in school. No topic was off limits in the Lasso house from either parent until one fall when everything changed.
Ted was 16 when his father died. That's how he put it to other people, anyway, even into adulthood. His dad passed away. He hadn't even made it to 40. He was only 38.
Michelle knew what happened. When they were dating and things were starting to get serious, Ted told her about how he had been in the house when it happened. How he had heard the gun go off. How he was the one who had found his father afterward. Michelle held Ted in her arms as he let out what he had been holding in for what felt like forever, but really had only been a few years.
She knew it weighed heavy on him, but never said otherwise whenever someone asked her why Ted's dad wasn't at their wedding. "He passed away when Ted was 16." She never met Ted's dad, but she knew about him. She knew he was a good man and had taught Ted how to play catch and throw darts. She knew he was the reason Ted was so handy with fixing things around their home.
She knew he was why Ted was terrified of being a father.
Ted and Michelle talked about having kids early on in their relationship. (Not having kids early, but talking early about having kids.) He knew she wanted at least one. Maybe two. Definitely not three, though. She had two siblings and one of them always got ganged up on and she didn't want that for any of her hypothetical kids. Ted was an only child. He hadn't been too lonely as a kid because he was lucky to grow up in a neighborhood with lots of other families so there was always someone else to play with.
He just wasn't sure about being a dad himself. He had had a good dad until he didn't have one at all. He was afraid of being a bad dad, but he was equally afraid of being a good one too. So maybe it was just better not to be one at all.
Michelle reassured him she wasn't in a rush to have kids right away, if that made any difference to Ted. It did, and he was grateful to her for telling him that. It would give them time—him time—to sift through his feelings about fatherhood. Maybe he would have a better idea about things once he was a little older. He and Michelle both had good jobs and were enjoying being together. It would be nice to hang onto that freedom for a while, especially since he was still helping his mom in the aftermath of his father's passing.
It was Ted's empathy for his mom that sealed the deal for Michelle. This was a man who cared and cared deeply. This was a man who was dedicated to his family. So, if they were to someday start their own family of more than just the two of them, she knew he would be dedicated to them too.
Michelle got pregnant in her late '30s. As soon as she told Ted the news, he stopped shaving. She didn't question it at first. She thought maybe he was just too busy prepping for the new addition to their family. He was still busy coaching, but not too busy to attend every baby class with her and read all the baby books he could get his hands on.
But when he began looking like Tom Hanks in Castaway, Michelle broached the topic as gently as she could. She told him that she wanted to see him in the pictures they would take with their son. She wanted to be able to recognize him and wanted their son to be able to do the same when he looked back on those same pictures as he got older.
Ted understood and the next morning trimmed the unruly facial hair down and shaved off the beard, leaving a prominent mustache above his lips. It shocked Michelle at first. She had never seen Ted with a mustache, only clean shaven or a full beard and mustache combo.
After a few days when it seemed the mustache wasn't going anywhere, Michelle finally asked, "Why the mustache?"
"I'm as old as my dad was when he…," Ted clenched his jaw and sighed. "I look just like him, Michelle. I can't be lookin' in the mirror and seein' his face every morning because that face quit on me."
"Okay," Michelle said quietly before kissing Ted softly. She had been kissing a full mess of a face the past few months, so this was slightly better. But it was still going to take some getting used to. "Okay."
She thought that maybe after Henry was born, Ted would get rid of the mustache. He still had to shave every morning, but then he would also have to trim and keep up with the dumb thing. It was a high maintenance part of Ted's life for someone who was a firm believer that it should only take someone the length of "Easy Lover" to get ready in the morning.
("That's just for clothes," Ted pointed out. "You gotta have patience when it comes to skin care and hygiene.")
Henry liked his dad's mustache. None of his friends had a dad with just a mustache, so it made him different (but in a good way). He could tell it was his dad from far away. He thought his dad looked cool on top of just being cool.
The mustache bothered Michelle. Though maybe it wasn't the mustache… maybe it was the man underneath it. The man, like the mustache, was ever-present. Though he was busy with work he still always seemed to be around when Michelle just wanted a little more time for herself. For years it felt like the walls were just creeping that much closer and it was starting to be too much.
Ted was a great man. Ted was a great father. Ted was a great coach.
Ted was a… good husband.
Actually, he was great at that too, if Michelle was being honest. But not in the way she needed or wanted him to be. Not anymore. She could tell they were growing apart, but she was the only one doing any of the moving. Ted had his feet planted firmly in the ground when it came to his family and he was determined not to let his son or Michelle down. And it wasn't that he had let Michelle down… it was just that she felt like she was being smothered by Ted's constant attention and check-ins. And she loved that he cared. (She knew some of her friends had been in marriages with men who turned out not to care at all.) But Michelle felt like Ted was too busy trying to care for her and Henry that he wasn't doing anything to care for himself.
And when she tried to bring that up to him, he couldn't see what she was talking about. He had told her he wasn't going to quit on her or Henry, so that was exactly what he was doing. He wouldn't be able to live with himself if he did any less.
But, it turned out, Michelle wasn't able to live with him because he did too much.
So he took a job in a different country. If space was what Michelle wanted and needed, then Ted was going to give her just that.
It just about tore Ted apart leaving Henry, but technology was better than it ever was when he was a kid. He could talk to his son every day either via the phone and/or video chat. He was making enough money that he wouldn't even have to blink at plane ticket prices. He hoped he could learn something from the distance about himself, but also about Michelle.
Their marriage had been enviably strong among their friends. They were married right out of college with zero extramarital affairs in the whole 20+ years they had been together. Ted was the epitome of faithful and Michelle was always grateful for that. That even though Ted's attention was too much for her sometimes, it wasn't because he was trying to cover anything up—that's just how he was. He called himself a "one person person" and she was his person.
Until she wasn't.
Ted couldn't pinpoint the exact moment Michelle wanted their marriage to end. He knew she was unhappy, which was why he agreed to the space. He should have had a bigger clue when she asked him to stop saying "I love you" to her over the phone because she couldn't will herself to keep saying it back.
By the end of her and Henry's visit to London a bit after Ted started his new job, he was certain, though. The worst part was, he could tell she felt bad about it—about not being able to love him the way she had when they first got together. As the taxi carrying Michelle and Henry drove away, Ted was surprised that his already broken heart could hurt even more. He had such a capacity to love, but there was nowhere to channel it.
The divorce papers were an additional level of heartbreak. Why Michelle needed that done during his weekend away at Liverpool would be something Ted would wonder about for a while.
The irony of meeting a beautiful woman while waiting for the hotel concierge to track down a fax machine so he could fax his divorce papers through to Michelle's lawyers was not lost on Ted. He had spent nearly his entire adult life being polite to women who were hitting on him, and would often accidentally flirt a bit back (Midwest manners outside the Midwest were often mistaken for flirting), but nothing ever came out of anything because he was a married man.
Always a people pleaser, though, Ted would chat up whoever was chatting him up regardless who it was. It just happened that time around it was Rebecca's best friend, Sassy.
Unbeknownst to Ted, Sassy had told Rebecca during a mid-karaoke smoke that she wanted to know more about Ted (Marlboro Man) and "ride that little mustache like a jet ski." Sassy loved Ted's mustache because of how out of date it seemed on the man's face—like he was stuck in some bygone era American television show where the dorky polite teen grew into the equally dorky polite man. She wanted to corrupt him somehow… you know, for a bit of a laugh.
When Sassy got to Ted's hotel room that night, she expected him to turn her away or make some sort of "aw, shucks" joke about the situation she was purposefully putting him into. But when he went along with it without any sort of hangup, she allowed herself a moment of genuine surprise that she was wrong before going all-in herself. She was divorced. He was… eager to please. It didn't have to mean anything.
And it didn't. Mean anything, that is. But it was fun and Sassy felt freer that night than she had in a long time. She had never shagged someone who kept things so verbally clean even as they did things that even she was shocked he agreed to. Turned out the Marlboro Man knew exactly what he was doing. The mustache might have screamed square, but Sassy had never been with someone who spent the entire time trying to make her feel good. An added bonus, his enthusiasm wasn't overcompensating for anything.
Ted was shook the following morning when he had time to actually think about what happened the night before.
There was quite a lead up to the extracurricular activities he and Sassy got up to. His team won at an away match they hadn't won in decades. He had the worst panic attack of his entire life and was almost convinced he was dying. (Thank goodness for Rebecca—he genuinely appreciated her coming to find him and helping him come out of it.) He got back to his hotel room and showered, trying to calm down before signing the divorce papers.
Turned out he didn't need a fax machine. Ted was able to take a picture of the signed documents and text those to Michelle's lawyers. It seemed too informal for Ted—getting divorced the same way he shared memes with his son.
After signing the papers, Ted took a long look at himself in the mirror. It was the same face he had seen for the past eight years with the addition of a few more lines and the shadows of some bags forming under his eyes. Michelle said he hadn't quit the marriage… that he was just letting her go. But he still felt like he was letting her down. Letting Henry down. Letting himself down.
He was reminded of his dad, as he often was. They had the same eyes. The same nose. But the mustache helped ground Ted in that it was him in that mirror. He offered a small smile to himself even though on the inside he was hurting. This was his life. And he was still here even though this moment was hard. He sometimes wondered what got too hard for his dad to stick around. And he sometimes wondered if he would think about doing the same thing. He had come of age idolizing his dad and wanting to follow in his footsteps. That day of his passing changed everything, though.
Ted mostly didn't regret having the one night stand with Sassy. He hadn't slept with Michelle in almost a year at that point and it physically felt good to blow off some steam (even if he mentally felt a bit guilty about it). He was constantly worried Sassy would be annoyed by how much he asked her about if what he was doing was okay, but she seemed all for it. She also kept calling him Marlboro Man all night, but he just went with it.
They ordered room service sometime during the night and got to talking a bit. He thought it would be weird if he brought up her friendship with Rebecca, so he tried to keep the topics neutral. Sassy asked him questions about Kansas and American football. He didn't mention his kid. She didn't mention any either, though it wouldn't have mattered to him if she had kids or not. This wasn't the start of a relationship, but rather a pit stop on the road of life. A sexy pit stop, certainly, but a pit stop nonetheless.
The following morning was a bit awkward for Ted. He was up early and quietly let Sassy sleep. He thought it was wild how peaceful she looked when the night before she was anything but. He fully understood why her nickname was her nickname, though it was something he swore to himself that he would never bring up with Rebecca.
He didn't kiss her goodbye, which was something he didn't think about until he was on the bus to London. He just played the whole night over and over again in his mind to himself, unaware that Beard was staring at him pretty much the entire ride back.
They had kissed the night before when they were in the middle of things. He had done it on instinct, eyes closed, and then froze when she giggled under his lips. Sassy laughed afterward at Ted who looked like a deer in headlights as he pulled away, apologizing immediately in case that wasn't something she wanted. She said she didn't care and that she had just laughed because she had never been kissed (on the face or otherwise) by someone who had only a mustache and was surprised there were any firsts for her left to be had.
On the bus, Ted thought about what Sassy said and was reminded of the first time he kissed Michelle after his mustache's debut. Michelle hadn't liked it at all at first. He wondered if she ever liked it, or if she only ever tolerated it for him. He wondered what else she had only tolerated for him all those years.
After Sassy, no one brought the mustache up until the following season. Ted was in a session with Dr. Fieldstone and she wove that topic into conversation as Ted was talking about his dad. He had opened up to Doc about his dad's passing after the game at Wembley and she had coaxed a bit more out of Ted each session thereafter. One afternoon she asked Ted if his dad had a mustache and Ted answered honestly that he did not. She then asked if that was why Ted had one—because he was afraid of seeing what his dad might have looked like had he lived longer—and he pretty much shut down for the remainder of his time with her that day. She didn't bring it up again, but hoped Ted might.
The second person Ted slept with after his divorce was also the first person he slept with after his divorce. "Second verse, same as the first," Ted sang quietly to himself as Sassy and he walked away from the Richmond bus after Rebecca's dad's funeral.
He almost missed the funeral altogether because of another massive panic attack. He wondered if anyone would have cared. Though, Rebecca did look relieved to see him (even though he had walked into the service late) and Sassy looked happy to see him at the get-together afterward. So, he might not have been missed, but at the very least his presence was accepted. And that's really the most he could hope for after the rough morning he had had.
The person at the check-in desk at the closest hotel to the post-funeral get-together knew exactly why Ted and Sassy were there. Without batting an eyelash, he handed them two room cards and told them what time checkout was the following day, even though he knew they wouldn't be there that long. They had no baggage (physically, anyway) and both were dressed in formal black attire. There were several guests at the hotel who were in town for the Welton funeral. What were two more?
There was less talking on Ted's part since he knew what Sassy had liked from their time together before. She would moan directions at him when she wanted him to move faster. Slower. Deeper. Again.
Just as eager to please, but more aware of himself and that he was still not okay from the morning's panic attack, Ted tried to channel his pain into her pleasure. He might not be all right, but it was an opportunity to try and pass things off like everything was okay. It was something he knew he shouldn't do, but sometimes it was the path of least resistance.
They didn't kiss on the lips at all this time and Ted felt this was almost a Pretty Woman scenario, except no money was being exchanged at any point. It was his own doing, though. He was pretty sure Sassy would let him kiss her if he wanted, but he had thought about it after their last encounter and had decided that he wasn't going to kiss anyone unless it was potentially leading to a relationship.
What he and Sassy were doing wasn't anywhere in the ballpark of romantic and it almost frightened Ted that he could be that intimate with someone knowing it wasn't heading somewhere. He respected Sassy's forwardness and self-awareness. She wanted fun, he wanted release. She wanted no strings, he wanted to let his mind be free from feeling too much about everything else, if only for a little while.
They didn't order room service that time. The small talk while they got dressed was just that, small. He kissed her on the cheek and hugged her once they were outside the hotel. She wished him and his mustache goodbye as she hopped in an Uber. Ted stood there and waved as the car drove off before bringing a hand to his upper lip.
He wondered if the next person he kissed would like the mustache. He wondered if they didn't like it if he would be ready to get rid of it for them. He wondered why he hadn't been willing to do that for Michelle and if he had done that for her if she would have stayed.
It wasn't just the mustache with Michelle, though. It was the too muchness. Ted wondered if the next person would think he was too much too. He wondered if Michelle's opinions of his too much would be someone else's opinion of not enough. He wondered if he would ever be enough for someone else because he missed being someone's someone. What he had with Sassy was a placeholder, but he missed the real thing in a bad way.
He missed his marriage. He missed his dad. He missed himself.
Ted Lasso didn't always have a mustache, even as an adult.
Though, as an adult, he wasn't sure he would always continue to have one. But, for the time being, he still needed it.