‘Gilmore Girls’: The One Reason Luke and Lorelai’s Proposal Was Different From the Rest
Gilmore Girls fans have spent decades debating Lorelai Gilmore’s love life. She spent much of the show’s seven seasons cycling between Max Medina, Luke Danes, and Christopher Hayden, with a couple of short-lived relationships in-between. Fans of the series mostly agree that Lorelai, just like her daughter, Rory Gilmore, was weird about commitment. A therapist in season 6 pinpointed why.
A Therapist in season 6 of Gilmore Girls once told Lorelai she viewed marriage as a way to fix problems
In season 6, Emily Gilmore attempted to set Christopher up with a therapist. The decision to hook Chris up with another love interest seriously irked Lorelai, who hadn’t quite figured out how she felt about Christopher. The appearance of the therapist was helpful in one way. She offered Lorelai the chance to talk about some of her problems.
In an unconventional therapy session in the backseat of a car, the therapist theorized that Lorelai never viewed marriage as something to enter into because of love. Instead, she suggested, Lorelai tended to view marriage as a way to fix a problem. The assessment was spot on, and viewers can see examples of it throughout Gilmore Girls.
Lorelai’s engagement to Max and marriage to Christopher were intended to fix problems
Early in the show, Lorelai was engaged to Max Medina, Rory’s teacher. While she and Max had good chemistry, he was pushy and seemed way more interested in making the relationship serious than Lorelai. He proposed after the pair had yet another argument and Lorelai appeared to accept because she didn’t want to have another fight. The therapist was right. Lorelai was attempting to fix a simple problem; she didn’t want to fight with her beau, so she agreed to marry him.
Lorelai married Christopher in season 7 of Gilmore Girls but admitted to the therapist that she had considered marrying him when she found out she was pregnant with Rory. The initial thoughts of marriage had negative connotations, and her actual marriage to Christopher didn’t fare much better. The pair married in Paris, and fans note that Lorelai seemed to go along because Christopher seemed desperate.
Luke and Lorelai’s engagement was the only engagement that didn’t attempt to fix a problem in the relationship
Luke and Lorelai’s engagement was a bit different than her other proposals featured on the show. Instead of attempting to fix a relationship problem, Lorelai proposed because she truly wanted to be with Luke. She was also the one to do the asking, a marked difference. That’s not to say that the engagement didn’t happen under duress, though. One can argue that the way it happened could have been the reason it all went wrong, too.
Lorelai proposed to Luke in the diner after finding out that Rory had moved into Emily and Richard Gilmore’s pool house. Even though she proposed, she refused to set a date until she settled things with Rory. Putting that limitation on the engagement didn’t do her any favors. Lorelai and Luke broke up before they walked down the aisle and only managed to get married in Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, a full ten years after the initial proposal.
