Barney Stinson is one of five main characters on How I Met Your Mother. He is a manipulative, oversexed businessman in his thirties who always wears a suit, likes women with "daddy issues" and is frequently willing to offer his (sometimes hypocritical) opinion.[5] Throughout the earlier seasons, Barney is a huge womanizer, and has been described as a "high-functioning sociopath" by his best friend, Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor). Barney has a plethora of strategies and rules designed to meet women, sleep with them, and discard them.[5] Through several seasons of the show, four of the main characters are couples, as Ted began dating Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders) and Ted's roommate Marshall Eriksen (Jason Segel) becomes engaged and later married to Lily Aldrin (Alyson Hannigan). This leaves Barney the only single character, and, according to Harris, Barney is "resentful" that the other characters have paired up. Later on, in season 5, he dates Robin. They end up breaking up not long after, once they both realize they are making one another miserable.

Harris describes Barney as a man who "likes to create crazy situations and then sit back and watch it all go down."[6] He is an opportunist who manipulates any situation so that it goes his way. He is also highly competitive, and will take on "challenges" to complete outlandish tasks in order to prove his worth by often announcing "Challenge Accepted". He is proud and stubborn, and attempts to stand by his word no matter what. In "I Heart NJ", for example, he refuses to put down his fist unless someone offers him a fist bump. By the end of the episode, he has the same fist elevated in a sling after struggling to keep his fist up throughout the episode. In "Lucky Penny", when the others do not believe that he can run the New York City Marathon the next day without training, Barney immediately agrees to do so. Although he succeeds, he is unable to walk afterwards. Although he thinks of himself as worldly, Barney is sometimes extremely naive, believing many lies his mother told him well into adulthood, such as believing that Bob Barker is his father.


Throughout the series Barney has claimed to have attended MIT; In the final season, Barney explains that MIT is an acronym for the Magicians Institute of Teaneck, not the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has worn a Cornell Big Red T-shirt,[9] indicating that he may have gone there, instead. As evidenced in Season 2 "Atlantic City", Barney learned at least conversational Korean, Chinese at some point, as well as some French. His musical skills include playing the drums and piano, dancing the tango and singing. He is also skilled at juggling and laser tag.