HBO announced recently that “Girls” will end next year, after its sixth season, which makes Season 5 (beginning on Sunday night) a transitional period. The demands of closure, even on HBO, probably mean that the show’s four young heroines will find some form of resolution amid the continual dysfunction and comic disasters of their lives. Indeed, the tagline given to the fifth season — “Finally piecing it together” — seems to imply just that kind of movement.

So maybe the relationships the women find themselves in this season will last. Or maybe not — you can easily imagine the series ending with some or all of the quartet man-free, facing the future together. What we know is that through four of the season’s 10 episodes, all of the women are paired off, in unions old, new, tentative or possibly illusory.

Like the recent season of Amazon’s “Transparent,” “Girls” starts with a wedding. Marnie (Allison Williams) is finally marrying the barely tolerable man-child Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). Hannah (Lena Dunham, the creator of “Girls”) is showing off her new, apparently normal boyfriend, her fellow schoolteacher Fran (Jake Lacy). Jessa (Jemima Kirke) is engaged in heavy flirting with Hannah’s ex, Adam (Adam Driver), and therefore racked with guilt. Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet), flying in from her new job in Tokyo, has a long-distance boyfriend in America and a crush on her Japanese boss.

True love never runs smooth on “Girls,” of course. Desi’s narcissism is a perennially blooming impediment to Marnie’s happiness, and Fran’s phone holds secrets that the relentlessly nosy Hannah soon uncovers. The only seemingly trouble-free relationship is the one that doesn’t involve any women: Elijah (Andrew Rannells) finds himself dating a television newsman played by Corey Stoll with his customary gimlet-eyed magnetism.