On the Season 5 finale of The Mindy Project, Mindy Lahiri finally gets married. Since the beginning of the show, this seems to have been Mindy’s overall life goal. She may have been a successful doctor, then a businesswoman and then a single mother, but her obsession with getting married never waned. Until this season.
After the love triangle debacle of Season 4 ended with Mindy choosing to be single, I thought that Mindy was embracing the modern idea that there’s more to life than getting married. She no longer despaired every time one of her relationships went south, but looked at her relationship with Ben with more mature eyes: he is an extension of her life, not her whole life.
As someone who’s unsure if she’ll ever get married, seeing Mindy admit to Ben that she didn’t think she wanted to get married was refreshing. Female-driven shows and movies are too often centered around women focusing their whole lives on finding “the one.” While there’s certainly nothing wrong with marriage, Mindy’s newfound independence and confidence in her lifestyle was something that I’ve rarely seen on TV since Samantha on Sex and the City. After spending her whole life fantasizing about getting married, Mindy finally found a guy ready to commit—and she didn’t want it.
However, despite Mindy’s anti-marriage statements to the recently-engaged Colette and her admission to Ben, the end of Season 5 finds us on a subway to Mindy’s wedding. Mindy makes a very Mindy-like proclamation of love to Ben: surprising him in a white lace dress with a sharply-dressed Leo and Lindsay in tow. It’s cute, but it doesn’t seem genuine. The gesture is very Mindy, but the sentiment isn’t there. Mindy seems to be doing it just because it seems like what a family should do; in fact, in the previous scene, Lindsay practically begs Mindy to marry her dad and become her stepmom. Somehow, in the course of 30 minutes (minus commercials!), Mindy completely reversed a decision that was years in the making.
Mindy seems to share my concerns in the last frame of the season as she stares out of the subway window with a look of anguish. I definitely understand Mindy’s torn feelings, as they’re ones I often have when thinking about marriage. As women, we’re expected to dream of getting married—and some of us do—but for those that don’t, the repercussions on relationships can be tormenting. I wish that Mindy had stuck to her decision to stay unmarried, at least until she had more time with Ben to discover if it’s what she truly wants. Luckily, The Mindy Project has been renewed for a sixth and final season, so we will be able to find out if Mindy made the right decision for herself.