What is marriage for? It’s an interesting question in our day and age, when marriage feels less and less necessary. Women are no longer as dependent on men for financial security (although many still are), and there is far less social stigma around having children or living together outside of wedlock. We also know that a significant amount of marriages don't last, with approximately 42 per cent in the UK projected to end in divorce before their 25th year. So why are we still so drawn to the fantasies of this institution?     

This is one of the underlying questions of season two of award-winning Netflix drama Beef. Several answers are explored through the series’ three main couples: Josh and Lindsay (Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan), Ashley and Austin (Cailee Spaeny and Charles Melton), and Chairwoman Park and Dr Kim (Youn Yuh-jung and Song Kang-ho). In episode six, Chairwoman Park, bogged down by efforts to cover up her husband’s culpability in a patient’s death, speaks candidly about why she married him: “This is such a headache! The whole reason I remarried was because he was fun. Someone to eat with. To travel with. That’s all.”

People get married for all kinds of reasons: family and societal pressures, visas, economic and financial security, and, of course, love. But one of the most common motivations is the simple fact that people don’t want to be alone. A 2024 survey commissioned by Forbes Advisor, which polled 1,000 divorced Americans, found that companionship was the second most common reason for getting married, with financial security first and love third. On Reddit, marriage forums are full of questions about marriage and loneliness, with one user questioning whether the idea that “you should never marry out of fear of ending up alone” makes any sense. “Isn’t [that] really the only reason to get married?” they ask. “If people seek stability and companionship, they get married.”

Recently, films and TV shows about marriage have made this fear of loneliness explicit. In Celine Song’s divisive romantic comedy Materialists (2025), matchmaker Lucy Mason (Dakota Johnson) finds herself in a love triangle with wealthy financier Harry Castillo (Pedro Pascal) and her broke, struggling actor ex-boyfriend, John Pitts (Chris Evans). The film explores the transactional logic of modern dating, suggesting that people increasingly date and marry not for love, but to prove their worth to others — and that doing so often means choosing someone who is above six foot, ripped, rich and with a full head of hair.

Lucy struggles to choose between a man who reflects status back at her (Harry) and one who arguably does not (John). In the end, she goes with her heart and chooses John, but as many people noted when the film was first released, it hardly feels like a choice at all. “Where are Lucy’s friends?” writer Soaliha asks on her Substack, Soaliloquy. Lucy has no one to truly confide in throughout the film, her social circle apparently limited to her colleagues and clients, and by the end, she appears to stay with John because she literally has “nowhere else to go”. While she does deeply love and care for him, it’s also fair to argue that her overarching preoccupation with ‘settling down’ stems, at least in part, from a fear of “dying alone”.

Kristoffer Borgli’s romantic black-comedy drama The Drama expresses a similar anxiety. The film follows Emma and Charlie (Zendaya and Robert Pattinson) as they prepare for their wedding day, only for everything to fall apart when Charlie’s friends make them play a game in which they confess the worst thing they have ever done. Emma admits that, as a lonely teenager, she planned a school shooting. The revelation sends their relationship spiralling and turns their wedding into a fiasco. Yet the film ends on a note of cautious optimism, with the pair reuniting at Emma’s favourite diner and reintroducing themselves to each other, in a poignant callback to the start of the film. After Emma reveals her darkest secret, Charlie proves himself hypocritical and disloyal, yet she still wants him. Is it love? Is it relief at no longer having to hide her past? Or is it, as the film suggests, that Emma has no one else? Like Materialists, The Drama left me wondering whether Emma ever really believed she could leave Charlie when the alternative was not freedom, but isolation.

Beef season two pushes this narrative even further. It’s not just that these couples only have each other, but that everyone outside the marriage begins to feel like a threat. The season’s catalyst arrives in episode one, when Ashley and Austin are asked to return their manager Josh’s wallet to his house. When they arrive, they hear screaming, peer through a window, and see Josh and Lindsay in the middle of a violent argument. Ashley records it and uses the footage to blackmail them. From that moment on, once Ashley and Austin have witnessed Josh and Lindsay at their worst, everything starts to crumble for all of them. But it doesn’t crumble entirely for the worst. 

In a climactic exchange in the final episode, Chairwoman Park offers a jaundiced view of love under capitalism: “Love lives in this system. All relationships exist in this system. They are all the same, another way to serve the self.” Marriage is supposed to save you from loneliness. It is supposed to grant you rights and signal to the world that you are lovable, desirable, chosen. But as Josh, Lindsay, Ashley and Austin continue to meddle in one another’s lives – trying to hurt, expose, destroy and eventually save each other – their emotional walls begin to come down. They become more honest, more vulnerable and more self-sacrificing than they ever were inside their sealed-off couples. In Beef, it is only by rupturing the closed circuit of marriage that they are finally able to express their full humanity.

I don’t want to spoil the ending of Beef – it is messy, complicated, depressing and unsatisfying, in ways both good and bad. But it shows that while marriage is often an attempt to ameliorate the loneliness of being alive, it can sometimes make that loneliness even worse. It is only in allowing ourselves to be seen and known, helped and supported by others in our best and worst moments, that we can, as Lindsay tells Ashley, “finally give our existence some semblance of meaning.” This might also teach us how to genuinely love one another: not by force, or out of desperation, but truly by choice.