11 things nobody wants to admit about Gilmore Girls

9. Lorelai and Christopher getting married wasn’t horrible

In the sixth season finale, Lorelai and Luke’s relationship reached its most uncrossable crossroads. Lorelai wanted to go through with their wedding, but Luke wanted to wait until he felt more settled in his role as April’s father. An ultimatum was thrown down and that was that. The episode’s cliffhanger revealed that Lorelai had slept with Christopher.

Truly, there’s no going back from that moment. As a character and as a writer, you can’t sweep that decision under the rug. You have to deal with it, and deal with it Lorelai and the writers did. The seventh and final season finally found the timing between Lorelai and Christopher being right. After years of running circles around each other, they lean into a committed relationship and get married. Of course, it wasn’t all written in the stars (season 5 reference).

Even though the timing for Lorelai and Christopher was right, they weren’t exactly in the same place they had been back in, say, season 2 when they were on the path to getting back together. They had been through so much separately and were different people. Those changes worked in their favor for a short period following their elopement, but they reared their ugly head during their marriage when real life wasn’t the fantasy they had been living in.

Still, Lorelai and Christopher’s short-lived marriage wasn’t the worst thing Gilmore Girls ever did. It was well-earned follow through on a long-teased loose thread in the series and in both of Lorelai and Christopher’s lives. They’d always felt like two ships in the night, passing each other but never being on the same page long enough to experience a real future together. The series needed to, at some point, explore Lorelai and Christopher as a romantic pairing.

Would it have worked better if it had happened sooner? Maybe! But it also works as a final season last-ditch effort romance. Lorelai crawled back to the relationship that felt comfortable to her: Rory’s father. She and Christopher have history. No other two people went through what they went through with their parents. No one felt what they felt. They get each other as some kind of strange soulmate situation.

Their marriage may not have been what we wanted to see, and it might have gotten in the way of Lorelai’s reconciliation with Luke (though in some ways, marrying Chris is what brought them back together), but it was necessary in the long run.