Lily Aldrin

Lily Aldrin is a fictional character created by Carter Bays & Craig Thomas for the television series How I Met Your Mother, portrayed by Alyson Hannigan.

She is a Kindergarten teacher. She is married to Marshall Eriksen and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Lily is the daughter of Janice Aldrin and the granddaughter of a woman named Lois.

She met Marshall during her freshman year at Wesleyan University in 1996 and dated him throughout her college years. The two became engaged in the fall of 2005, as portrayed in the series pilot. Towards the end of the first season, she reveals to Robin that she has been having second thoughts about getting married without having experienced much else of life before Marshall. Those doubts intensify, and she acts upon them, applying for a painting fellowship on the West Coast. She originally tells Ted she decided not to go through with it, but Marshall finds out she did, and was accepted. After arguing the point on and off, with several pause breaks in between for drinks, dinner at Red Lobster, and sex, Lily cannot promise Marshall that she would return to him after the three-month fellowship, and the engagement ends.

She later confesses that her decision to leave was a mistake, but it takes several episodes until Marshall re-embraces her and their romantic relationship. Soon after, they resume their engagement. Episode 10 of season 2 implies that within a year, Marshall and Lily will be married. They finally married in "Something Borrowed," the penultimate episode of the second season.

She despises the word "moist."