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In ‘Ted Koppel’s Big Night Out‘, Lorelai admits to being unsure about dating Jason (Digger) Stiles because he’s now her father’s partner, not her type, is from her ‘hood’, and doesn’t want to upset things with Emily. However, she does seem pleased by his continued attentions.
Lorelai had initially turned Digger down for dinner, saying she didn’t find him “repulsive,” but that there were too many things against the relationship. However, after Emily & Richard have a big fight at the Yale/Harvard game, resulting from Lorelai asking about Pennilyn Lott and Richard needing to confess to secretly seeing her once a year for 39 years, Emily blows up at Lorelai. And that drives Lorelai to instantly call Jason…
So, did Lorelai call Jason out of interest – now that Emily is already mad at her – our out of spite, to make Emily mad?
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251 days ago
It’s a great question, Arieanna, and I think the answer is yes, deep down inside, a little part of her thrives on breaking with her mother — at least I think it’s what Amy was trying to say about Lorelai — it’s the only explanation of why she’d put Christopher off for so long (Emily and Richard wanted her to marry him), and the way she proposes to Luke immediately after the fight with her parents over Rory at the end of Season 6, and, not surprisingly, once Emily buys a house for her to live in with Luke, it’s not the kind of marriage she wants. There’s a pattern here.
On the surface, it seems like she’s probably rationalizing that she’s not doing it just to spite Emily, but simply that if Emily is going to continue to lash out at her and blame her for things over which she has no control (unearthing the secret about Pennilyn Lott), she can’t win with Emily so she might as well stop worrying about offending her and do what she wants.
But even Jason knew (and said) the more Emily disliked him, the odds were that Lorelai would go out with him. Jason was clearly a man who enjoyed challenging his parents and tapped into that side of Lorelai. This is a season where we see that, without Rory, Lorelai has been engaging in a lot of childish, secretive behavior that she knows rubs Emily the wrong way, but she’s regressing. She never got to grow up normally at 16 and find her own way — she skipped the end of her youth and moved directly to becoming a mother — and with Rory gone, she can go back to acting like a teenager in some parts of her life.
The one person Lorelai does not want to be like is Emily, and the idea of having Christopher sell insurance like Richard and her become a version of her mother was probably horrifying to her. It set up a pattern of behavior in her, and the dating of Jason immediately after Emily lashes out at her is not coincidental.
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251 days ago
Suspect Lorelai was always a little intrigued by Jason but he had the bad habit of doing something which tossed chaos into her world [the canoe tipping / wet t-shirt incident as tweens and the cancelling of Emily's party which blew all of Lorelai's work as adults] so she always held him at arms length. In fact the last incident actually transiently brought Emily and Lorelai closer together in shared compassion for each other’s plight. So that left Lorelai vulnerable to being blind-sided when Emily blew her cork over Richard and PL and transferred the blame to Lorelai. This gave her the excuse she needed to initially date Jason, mostly to spite Emily [but probably also to satisfy her curiosity]. That she continued to date him of course had little to do with Emily and everything to do with their intellectual and physical chemistry which worked out much better than Lorelai would have ever predicted.
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249 days ago
I think it is quite clear that Lorelai dated Jason to spite Emily but oops! she realized she actually likes him. This is straight out of the RomCom playbook. Of course GG being a drama rather than a comedy, it doesn’t quite work out in the end, but still it was a fun ride.
Or more simply, I agree with the first two commenters.
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