Lily Aldrin-Erikson is a fictional character created by Carter Bays and 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 was chosen as the Slap Bet Commissioner for the slap bet between Marshall and Barney.
She despises the word "moist" and is characterized as a "loud chewer" by Ted.
In the third season, it is revealed that Lily is a shopaholic, and goes shopping (particularly for shoes and boots) when something bad happens. Her multiple credit cards are kept in a "box of shame", which is just a pink shoebox. Her credit card debt is not yet revealed, but will be later in Season 3.
Lily, along with Ted and Marshall occasionally indulged in "sandwiches" (Future Ted's euphemism for marijuana) during college, and at the 20th college reunion.
