‘Gilmore Girls’: Lorelai Gilmore Was Never Supposed To Attend Yale
Gilmore Girls fans may know that Lorelai Gilmore ruined her parents’ plans for her by getting pregnant at 16. To cause further tension, Lorelai refused to marry her child’s father and instead left her family’s home in Hartford, Connecticut, to settle with Rory Gilmore in Stars Hollow. Fans have long assumed that Lorelai was supposed to attend Yale, just like her father, but that was never the plan in the first place.
Lorelai Gilmore disappointed her parents by failing to follow the Gilmore plan
Richard and Emily Gilmore’s disappointment in Lorelai was palpable. For seven seasons, fans of Gilmore Girls squirmed as Lorelai’s big mistake was brought up repeatedly. Based on everything that the Gilmores have said about the situation, Richard and Emily carefully laid out Lorelai’s life for her before she got pregnant with Rory.
While the family often talks about what could have been, they rarely mention the plan in detail. During the show’s original run, fans did learn that Lorelai was the brightest student in her class and that she was multitalented. In flashbacks, fans found out that she, like her daughter, attended a prestigious prep school. She also had an interest in travel and had every intention of attending college.
Lorelai was never supposed to attend Yale, though
Since Richard was a Yale alum, fans largely assumed that Richard and Emily had hoped Lorelai would go to the prestigious school. After all, they were beside themselves when Rory decided to attend Yale instead of Harvard or Princeton. That wasn’t the plan, though.
In season 2 of the show, Lorelai revealed that before she got pregnant with Rory, the family had planned for her to attend Vassar College. Vassar, a college in Poughkeepsie, NY, is highly regarded for its liberal arts programs. Lorelai did note that Richard and Emily had always hoped she would marry a “Yale man.”
Rory’s life was similarly planned out, and she too abandoned the plan
Lorelai wasn’t the only one who had her life planned out for her from the time she was a child. While Lorelai didn’t exactly push Rory the same way her parents pushed her, she certainly fed into obsessive future-planning. During the show, it was mentioned that Rory planned to attend Harvard. The decision was made when she was still a toddler. Essentially, the precocious toddler had the college of her dreams picked out before she even learned to hold a pencil correctly.
As the years moved forward, that plan became more concrete. After all, the entire reason Lorelai connected with her parents again was to give Rory a better chance of an Ivy League acceptance letter. In season 2, she and Rory even road-tripped to Harvard. Rory was on board. Still, she decided to forgo the carefully laid out plan. Sure, she still attended an Ivy League school, but her decision to attend Yale was a deviation from the plan.
