Who Does Meredith End Up With On Grey's Anatomy?

It's a severe understatement to say that Meredith Grey, played by Ellen Pompeo, goes through a lot during her time on "Grey's Anatomy." She survives a bomb in a body cavity, a shooting at the hospital she calls home, a plane crash, drowning after a ferryboat accident, a vicious attack from a patient, and a particularly horrible case of COVID-19 that leaves her in a coma. Throughout all of those harrowing events, Meredith stays strong, perseveres, and becomes a world-class, award-winning general surgeon ... and she also has a number of important romantic relationships, one of which takes center stage during most of her time on the show.

It should be said that Pompeo left "Grey's Anatomy" as a full-time cast member in February of 2023 — she's still involved with the long-running medical drama as an executive producer, provides voiceover for the episodes, and appears on the show semi-regularly — but across 19 seasons of the show, Meredith Grey's love life was one of the central points of the entire show, from the man she meets in the pilot who eventually becomes her husband to her widowhood and return to dating. So who does Meredith end up with when all is said and done? Here's the answer, plus the timeline of all her relationships up until that point. (A final note: any of Meredith's flames who only stuck around for a single episode or a small handful of them won't make this list, with our apologies to Chris O'Donnell's Finn Dandridge, for example.)

For most fans of "Grey's Anatomy," there's one relationship that comes to mind when you think of Meredith Grey — her best friend Cristina Yang, played by Sandra Oh (who left the series in the Season 10 finale). After Cristina, though, Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey) is a very close second. In the show's very first episode, Meredith meets Derek at a local Seattle bar and takes him home, only to discover, during her first day of work, that the guy she slept with the night before is the new head of neurosurgery at Seattle Grace Hospital ... and she's a surgical intern. 

Throughout the following five seasons, Meredith and Derek experience a ton of ups and downs, starting with the fact that, at the end of Season 1, Derek's wife Addison Shepherd (Kate Walsh) arrives in Seattle and lets Meredith know that he's been married this whole time. After Derek and Addison finally split for good, the path is clear for Meredith and Derek, though Meredith does tend to get in her own way; her fear of commitment tends to drive Derek away, and during Season 4, it drives him into the arms of a nurse named Rose (Lauren Stamile). At the end of that season, Derek and Meredith finally make everything official, and at the end of Season 5, without any time to go down to City Hall and get officially married, they write vows to each other on a blue Post-It note, promising never to run (even when things get hard) and to stick together forever. 

At the end of Season 6 of "Grey's Anatomy," a disgruntled patient's husband brings a gun to the hospital now called Seattle Grace Mercy West (after a merge with another nearby medical facility), and Derek, who serves as chief of surgery at the time, is the gunman's intended victim. After he's shot, Meredith, newly pregnant, suffers a miscarriage due to the stress ... but in Season 7, a little girl from Africa comes into their lives and changes their future for the better.

When Meredith and Derek meet Zola — a six month old baby with spina bifida who needs surgery — they both fall in love with her right away and apply to adopt her, but the journey to become Zola's parents isn't easy. After Meredith tampers with Derek's clinical trial (where he's trying to find a cure for Alzheimer's disease, which killed Meredith's mother), they briefly split up and the social worker on their case temporarily removes Zola from their home; thankfully, they do get her back for good shortly thereafter. Despite Meredith's ongoing fertility issues, she reveals that she's pregnant in Season 9, and during that season finale, she gives birth during a historically devastating storm and a blackout in the hospital (which is now named Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital after the doctors who lost their lives in the Season 8 plane crash). Thanks to an assist from her mentor Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson), Meredith survives a C-section with complications, and she and Derek welcome a baby boy named Derek Bailey Shepherd.

Throughout Season 10 and 11 of "Grey's Anatomy," Meredith struggles with her work-life balance, trying to be a present mother for both Zola and Bailey while also devoting herself to her surgical career ... and unfortunately, Derek isn't particularly supportive. This isn't because he's against her professional success, per se, but he does prioritize his own career developments over Meredith, particularly when the President of the United States offers him a job running a brain mapping initiative in Washington D.C. With Meredith unwilling to move, Derek gives up the job but is clearly resentful and later goes back on his word and accepts it, leaving Meredith along in Seattle with their kids.

It really feels, for a while, like Meredith and Derek are going to split up, but in Season 11, they reaffirm their commitment to their marriage (and their framed Post-It with their vows), spending happier days together before Derek takes one final trip to the nation's capital to finish out his work with the President. On his way to the airport, Derek witnesses a car accident and pulls over to help the victims ... and as he drives away having saved multiple lives, his car is hit by a truck, leaving him in critical condition. He's rushed to a small hospital nearby, but the doctors taking care of him completely mishandle his case and concentrate on his chest injuries instead of his obvious neurological issues, and he's left hooked up to machines until Meredith arrives with her children. Meredith makes the devastating choice to turn off his life support, ending Derek's life — and the marriage to the man who was, in all likelihood, the love of her life.

After Derek's death, Meredith takes her two children and basically vanishes, assuring her friends that she's safe but that she needs and wants to be left completely alone. This makes it extra surprising for her loved ones, especially her closest friend Alex Karev (Justin Chambers) — whom she has listed as her emergency contact — when she gives birth to a baby girl in Season 11, meaning she was pregnant at the time of Derek's death. Meredith, along with her youngest child Ellis Shepherd and her siblings Bailey and Zola, returns to Seattle and, in honor of her late husband, always wears Derek's signature scrub cap into the operating room (it's covered with ferryboats as an ode to Derek's favorite form of transportation in Seattle).

In Season 12, Meredith feels a spark with a military doctor named William Thorpe (Scott Elrod), but after they spend the night together, Meredith, who hasn't been with anyone since Derek's death, panics and kicks him out of her house (and never speaks to him again). Later in that same season, Nathan Riggs, a former Army medic who worked closely with Grey Sloan Memorial's head of trauma Owen Hunt (Kevin McKidd), comes to work at the hospital, and he becomes Meredith's first real romantic partner after Derek. Unfortunately for Meredith and fortunately for Nathan, the relationship ends in the Season 13 finale when Nathan realizes that the love of his life (and Owen's sister) Megan Hunt, played by Abigail Spencer, is alive — she was presumed dead for years after going missing in Iraq, where she served in the army with Owen and Nathan — and Meredith urges Nathan to go and be with Megan, because if she found out Derek was still alive, she'd do the same thing.

It feels fitting that, after Meredith meets Derek when she's a new surgical resident (actually, a first-year intern), Meredith ends up dating a subordinate of her own. At the end of Season 14, Meredith shares a totally unexpected kiss with the young resident Dr. Andrew DeLuca (Giacomo Gianniotti), who's heartbroken after his girlfriend and fellow resident Sam Bello (Jeanine Mason) is forced to move away so that she's not deported. Meredith initially brushes off her kiss with Andrew — and very briefly flirts with the hospital's new orthopedic surgeon Dr. Atticus Lincoln (Chris Carmack — but after Andrew spends quite a lot of time pursuing her, she eventually falls for him; they start officially dating in Season 15.

Sadly, Andrew and Meredith just aren't meant to be. After Meredith commits insurance fraud to help a young patient whose parents are undocumented (and therefore uninsured), Andrew takes the fall and briefly goes to jail for her ... forcing Meredith to confess to save him, which nearly costs her her medical license. (There's also an ongoing issue in their relationship where Andrew feels hurt that Meredith keeps comparing him to Derek.) When Meredith confronts Andrew about his devastating mood swings and anger issues, suggesting that he might need psychiatric care, their relationship ends (and Andrew is ultimately diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which allows him to get treatment.) Despite making huge strides regarding his mental health in Season 17, Andrew, now an attending, ends up chasing a human trafficker through Seattle and is killed during the chase.

Speaking of Season 17, that particular season aired in 2020 — and you might remember that the entire year was affected by the global COVID-19 pandemic. As a medical series, "Grey's Anatomy" basically had to address the issue, and they did so by giving Meredith such a severe case of the novel coronavirus that she slips into a coma. During the season premiere, she sees Derek in her COVID dreams on an imaginary, hallucinated beach where she speaks to loved ones who, within the show's narrative, have passed away (her sister Lexie Grey, Lexie's soulmate Mark Sloan, and Meredith's best friend and fellow resident George O'Malley — played by Chyler Leigh, Eric Dane, and T.R. Knight, respectively — all show up too). After Andrew is attacked and killed chasing that human trafficker, he also appears on the beach, which is how Meredith knows that he's gone.

Before any of this happens, though, Meredith crosses paths with widowed pediatric surgeon Cormac Hayes (Richard Flood) in Season 16 after Cristina "sends" him as a "gift" (Cormac worked alongside Meredith's "person" in Zurich before heading to Seattle). The two hit it off quickly and, throughout Meredith's illness, Cormac is frequently by her side — he's actually the person who finds her in the Grey Sloan Memorial parking lot after she collapses from the onset of her case of COVID-19 — and talks to her about her kids, encouraging her to fight for her life even as he's unsure that she can ever hear him. Because of Meredith's convalescence, the two miss a window to start a relationship even after she recovers from COVID-19, and Cormac ultimately moves back to Ireland with his children.

Way back in Season 14 of "Grey's Anatomy," Meredith has an inauspicious meeting with a patient (who also happens to be a doctor) named Nick Marsh, played by Scott Speedman. Though Nick initially comes to Grey Sloan Memorial as a physician — as a transplant surgeon, he's there to pick up a liver for a patient of his own — he collapses in the hallway, at which point Meredith discovers a complication from Nick's own recent kidney transplant. She ends up saving his life and Nick vanishes, only to reappear in Season 18.

At this point, Meredith has had some seriously lackluster developments in her romantic life — including a date that starts out well and goes downhill quickly with a guy named John ("How I Met Your Mother" alum Josh Radnor) — and it's safe to say that Nick basically sweeps her off her feet when Meredith travels to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and sees Nick again in the Season 18 premiere. While Meredith works on a project centered around Parkinson's disease and splits her time between Minnesota and Seattle, she and Nick form an on-again, off-again relationship, though long distance proves difficult for both of them; Nick ultimately decides to temporarily work at Grey Sloan Memorial to be closer to Meredith. Ultimately, when Meredith moves to Boston, which is the impetus for Pompeo's exit from the show, Nick moves with her.

"Grey's Anatomy" is available to stream on Netflix and Hulu now.