How I Met Your Mother

During the episode of How I Met Your Mother a lot of conflict and interpersonal communication is taking place. Not only in romantic relationships, but even friendships or dealing with someone who lives near you. You see how ted deals with the obnoxious couple who lives above them, how Lily and Marshal get through a tough argument, and how Robin and Barney Avoid fighting. Many of the terms we learned in the Floyd 2011 pertain to conflict in this particular episode. The demand-withdraw pattern, symmetrical relationship, hostile couples, and compromising are only a few examples of the conflict and interpersonal communication during How I Met Your Mother.
First, the demand-withdraw pattern, as described in our book (Floyd, 2011) demand-withdraw pattern is “a pattern of behavior in which one party makes demands and the other party withdraws from the conversation”(Page 359.) You see this a lot in Robin and Barneys relationship. During this episode Barney explains to Marshall and Ted how him and Robin never fight. You find out that its because when one of them gets mad or upset about something and demands to talk about it, the other one quickly avoids the conversation. Barney will just leave to avoid any argument, and Robin starts to take her clothes off so Barney’s mind gets off track about the argument. You start to realize as the episode goes on that this is in effective way of communicating conflict. As the episode comes to a close they constantly keep fighting because they were found in a situation where neither could walk away.
However, we also deal with Marshall and Lilly who we can see have a symmetrical relationship. (Floyd 2011) states how a symmetrical relationship is “a relationship between parties of equal power” (Page 364.) A lot of the episode we see how angry Marshall is getting that every time he eats something he has to clean his dish. Without Barney getting into his head a lot of what Marshall and Lilly were doing seemed to be just fine. When Marshall started realizing that this fight was not worth it he and Lily started to compromise. (Floyd 2011) states that compromising is “a strategy for managing conflict in which bother parties give up something they want so that both can receive something they want” (Page 375.) When they worked out just that one argument, all the other small ones seemed to work out too.