Just Gilmore Girly Things: L is for Luke and Lorelai

Just Gilmore Girly Things is a blog series on my inexplicable obsession with the CW/WB series Gilmore Girls that aired from 2000-2007. This series explores the personal and social connections I’ve made in my repeated watch-throughs over the last 23 years that nobody asked for. 

It's no secret that Luke Danes (Scott Patterson) holds a special place in my heart and that probably comes through in how I interpret his character throughout the series. But I think that Luke and Lorelai (Lauren Graham) embody what I would call “True Love.” 

Admittedly, their relationship is definitely not perfect, but for the most part, they treat each other with genuine care and I believe that it’s because they were at first truly Real Friends. Their friendship is something that they both value and they both give each other space to be themselves. 

I’ll try to explain from what I consider the beginning. 

When the series begins, Luke and Lorelai had known each other for a few years but it’s implied that Lorelai doesn’t see him as a potential romantic interest until that first episode, whereas Luke has been holding a bit of a flame for her since they first met (which is approximately eight years before their first date). 

On the surface, that’s an accurate enough description. But I think what makes their relationship special is in understanding the context of that disparity in interest and why it takes so long to lead anywhere. 

First, Luke meets Lorelai at the diner that he’s only been running for a few years at that point. She’d have been in her early twenties trying to care for a tween. From what I’ve inferred, Luke may be a couple years older than her, but not significantly but at that age within a proprietor/patron relationship of a small town business, it might be enough to make Luke uneasy with the idea of pursuing anything beyond their flirty banter. 

However, Lorelai is a bit of a social flirt and between her career and Rory (Alexis Bledel), she just wouldn’t have the mental space to seriously consider a relationship. But Luke’s Diner becomes a safe space not just for Lorelai, but also Rory. 

When I restarted my current rewatch cycle, I realized the significance of how at the end of the first episode, when Lorelai first jokingly expresses vague interest in him, Rory is adamantly opposed to it. She’s already watched Lorelai cycle through short term relationships in her life, but Luke and the diner are stable consistencies that she needs in her adolescence. 

And the reason why they’re stable consistencies, is because Luke and Lorelai have already developed a foundation of trust and safety through their friendship. One of my theories is that it may actually be because Luke may accept and reciprocate her casual flirtations throughout the years, he never asks for or resents her for not giving him more than that. Yeah, he finds her attractive, he enjoys spending time with her, but he’s content with the relationship they have if the alternative is not having a relationship at all. 

And you can see that in the way that they support each other through their respective relationships prior to pursuing a relationship together. Honestly, I think if Gilmore Girls was set 20 years later, they’d most definitely be polyamorous. 

Take Rachel (Lisa Ann Hadley), for instance. While Lorelai isn’t ready to admit her feelings for Luke at that point, she can see that Rachel is someone that means a lot to him. At first it makes her insecure, but when it comes to supporting him or giving him advice, she always encourages him to do what’s best for him, regardless of whether or not it meant that she’d no longer have him as an option. 

It’s why Lorelai does bond with Rachel for the time she’s there. Rachel also genuinely cares about Luke, which is why when she sees that he has some kind of connection with Lorelai that he’s ignoring out of respect for her, Rachel walks away without any real hard feelings. 

[Alternate Timeline: I often like to imagine an alternate universe Gilmore Girls where Rachel, Luke and Lorelai are in romantic polyamorous relationships together. There’s a genuine chemistry there!]

But this is also why he struggles when he finds Lorelai to tell her the news and discovers that she’s already in another relationship with someone he had no idea about. While he’s not as encouraging of Max (Scott Cohen) as she was of Rachel, when he realizes that Lorelai is hurt by it, he builds her a chupa (because as a man, Luke can’t just say congratulations) for their wedding as a gesture of his friendship. 

Which is also why Lorelai specifically doesn’t pursue Luke after she calls off the wedding. She wants to keep Luke in her life, but she knows that if she pursues a romantic relationship with him, she could lose him as a friend if she’s not actually ready—which is not a gamble that she’s willing to make. 

Especially because Lorelai isn’t just looking for a partner, she’s looking for a partner who has to be a good stepfather to her child. Because at the end of the day, Rory is her biggest priority. In fact, Rory, Jess (Milo Ventimiglia) and April (Vanessa Marano) are the only people that ever truly divide them.

But before I can talk about what divides them, I should finish talking about the things that bring them together. 

Luke and Lorelai ground each other. She’s charismatic, impulsive and externalizes all her emotions, while he’s pretty much the opposite. But Luke is also probably the most Left person on the show, constantly decrying materialism and revisionism and ecological destruction, and while Lorelai is forced to re-engage in a relationship with her Republican parents that’s constantly trying to draw her back to the Right, he keeps her straying too far. 

Luke also actually sees Lorelai as a human being rather than a future wife-in-training. He genuinely cares about what's happening in Lorelai's (and tangentially Rory’s) life regardless of where he thinks their relationship is going. While he tries his best to stay out of their business, he’s always compelled to jump in to give warnings or advice (as mockingly as he can be at times) because he cares what happens to them. And at the end of the day, he lets Lorelai make her own choices, regardless of whether he agrees with them or not. 

I think he does struggle with poor boundaries that Lorelai sometimes takes advantage of, but that's related more to his poor self-esteem because he never actually sets them. At times, it does seem like she’ll test his limits before he’ll speak up for himself. She teaches him to be a little more selfish, and he reminds her to think about herself less. 

And when he recognizes that something he’s said or done has hurt her feelings or their relationship, he reflects and (eventually) apologizes and tries to adjust. For example, once they were already in a relationship, when he sees he's hurt her relationship to snow, something he knows symbolizes some kind of childhood hope for her, he recognizes the actual impact of that.  When he builds an ice rink in her yard, it’s not just as a grand gesture, it’s to help repair the damage he did with her relationship with snow. And he doesn’t show up that way just for Lorelai. 

That’s also how he shows up for his sister (Kathleen Wilhoite), to the point of integrating himself into her Renaissance Faire community while he was helping her and her husband, despite not understanding them. Then when he learns to communicate better, he immediately uses it to try and guide Jess to learn better as well. 

And Lorelai also apologizes to him. There are times where she misunderstands or projects onto him, and when she recognizes that something she’s done hurt him, she’s often overcome with guilt. 

I also think it’s really important that they didn’t begin to pursue a serious relationship until they were both in similar places in their lives. They don’t kiss for the first time until Lorelai is also running her own business and Rory has settled into adult independence, leaving Lorelai ready to explore her own. When they break up over April’s introduction into his life, it’s because they both had to experience being on the other side of the relationship problems that they’re usually on. 

Also, Luke invests some serious money into her career and her home but he never holds it over her. His intention when he does it is to improve her life, when he leaves, he doesn’t feel that logically means that he’s entitled to take back the improvements he invested in, even when Lorelai ends up married to Christopher (David Sutcliffe). 

Anyways Luke is one of my favourite fictional models of masculinity, and I attribute at least part of my predisposition to flannel to him.