Friends: Who Joey Ended Up With (& Why He Didn't Get Married)
Joey Tribbiani was the one character in Friends who never had a committed relationship, and even though he was single when the series ended, he eventually found the right partner. Created by David Crane and Marta Kauffman, Friends made its debut on NBC in 1994 and lived on for nine more seasons, coming to an end in 2004. Friends continues to be quite popular, more so now that it has joined the world of streaming thanks to HBO Max, with a special episode planned to arrive in the near future.
Friends follows the ups and downs in the lives of a group of six young adults living in New York City, who tried their best to balance their social, personal, and professional lives. With time, Monica, Rachel, Phoebe, Chandler, Ross, and Joey became part of pop culture, and they had such an impact on viewers that Friends had a spin-off series focused on one of its most beloved characters: Joey (Matt LeBlanc). The show, appropriately titled Joey, followed the title character’s life after the finale of Friends and took viewers to Los Angeles as Joey moved there to focus on his acting career.
Joey continued struggling to get a steady job as an actor, and he also continued dating lots of women, as he did through his whole arc in Friends. Throughout his series, Joey had a complicated on-off relationship with his neighbor, Alex (Andrea Anders). They met in the pilot episode of Joey, where he obviously tried to hit on her, only to learn that she was married. Alex got a divorce and became romantically involved with Joey, but just like him, she had some trouble with commitment and the concept of marriage (though for different reasons, of course). By the end of the series, Joey and Alex were in a committed relationship, and even though they were engaged at some point, at the end of the episode they didn’t have plans of getting married.
Joey was never one to get married, even though he proposed to Phoebe and Rachel upon hearing they were pregnant and he was later engaged to Alex, but Joey’s real problem was his fear of commitment. What was most important for Joey towards the end of his series was to settle down, which doesn’t necessarily involve getting married. Both Alex and Joey had doubts about getting married, which is understandable given their own experiences and how their relationship developed, but being in a serious relationship was a big step for them. By the end of his arc in Joey, he was ready to settle down with Alex, and that’s much more important and significant for the character than marriage.
It’s quite possible that Joey and Alex could have gotten married at some point after the events of Joey, given they were already working that out, but that’s not really something Joey needed. In the end, Joey was the only one from the main group in Friends that didn’t get married, but he did end up in a committed relationship with Alex.