When I ask you if you're team Logan, Jess, or Dean, you know exactly what I mean and there's a good chance you feel strongly about your answer. People who are team Jess mean business. Team Dean people are, well, unique. And team Logan are the most sane of them all. I'm team Logan, so I might be biased, but hear me out.

Rory's relationships aren't just love interests. They represent different life paths and arguments surrounding identity, class, ambition, and what a woman is allowed to want, or was allowed to want in the 2000s. This show is about much more than just one girl's love interests. It's about generational trauma, inheritance, and mother-daughter relationships of all kinds. But the three Gilmore Girls put a lot of stock in their romantic relationships, so let's just say it's relevant to the conversation.

It is my humble opinion that Logan Huntzberger is the right answer, but not for the reasons his critics think.

Let us start with the first boyfriend, high school sweetheart, tall and mysterious from Chicago, Dean Foster. While Dean's flowy hair and car making is the classic "first love", he represents Stars Hollow and the small town identity that Rory leaves early on in her character development.

He's safe, familiar, unchallenging, and ultimately threatened by everything Rory is becoming. Dean is who Rory would have ended up with if she never developed a mind of her own, if she did what she was told and what was expected of her forever. He loves the version of Rory that stays small enough to need him, not the version that thrives at Yale or in her dream of being an overseas correspondent.

Every time she grows, reads something he hasn't read, gets an opportunity he can't follow her into, things get a little rusty between them. He wants her to be less than she could be, not out of cruelty but because the bigger she becomes, the smaller he feels, just like Stars Hollow. The more she explores the world outside her tiny hometown, the more she wants for herself.

He represents the life Lorelai escaped, and that Rory is always in danger of letting hold her back. He's not the worst person in the world, but he is the worst person for Rory based on her goals and ambitions. And he knows this, which is why he's also so sullen and resentful all the time. Lorelai's shadow hangs over this relationship more than anyone acknowledges. Every time Dean feels threatened by Rory's growth, it mirrors exactly what Lorelai was running from when she left her parents' world. Dean is the Stars Hollow version of that trap.

And with the end of Dean, we see the beginning of Jess.

Jess Mariano represents the idea of the perfect person. He's definitely the most romantically compelling. Hopeless romantics love a Jess. I get it. But he's the least functional.

Yes, he's intellectually matched to Rory, pushes her to be better, challenges her reading and thinking, and he genuinely sees her. He also disappears, communicates horribly, and spends most of their relationship emotionally unavailable. He gets romanticized because of his brooding and rough past, but in real life, those things don't excuse poor behavior to those closest to us. Anyone who has dated a Jess knows it's way better in theory than in real life. I escaped my Jess, and I hope you did too. If not, godspeed.

He is who Rory, and all of us, wants to believe she wants, the literary bad boy with a good heart. The show shows us that wanting that idea and actually building a life with that person are different things. He gets her in trouble, strays her from her path in the name of fun and impulsiveness.

Some argue that he could be her Luke. Everyone loves Luke, and Luke and Lorelai could have been soulmates, amazing together. Except Luke and Lorelai were a disaster for an unreasonably long time. Being in love with someone and feeling they're your person doesn't always mean it's a healthy relationship and that you'd be good at being together. Rory deserves better than an on-again-off-again, constant lack of communication relationship. If Jess is her Luke, I'm still not for it.

Finally, all of Rory's high school efforts have paid off and she makes a choice for herself. She chooses Yale, even though her mom wanted her to pick Harvard. She chose what was best for her, and this is when Logan Huntzberger first shows up on our screens.

Logan is the balance of all of Rory's worlds.

Logan gets dismissed as the privileged rich boy who represents everything Lorelai ran from, and he does represent that. What watchers forget to notice is that Rory didn't choose to run from that life. In fact, she has chosen over and over to run towards it. We see this when she attends Chilton, in her obsession with Harvard, her need to be close to her grandparents, and eventually choosing her grandparents' alma mater, Yale. Rory has always wanted the world her grandmother inhabits as much as the world her mother built. That tension between two inheritances runs through all three relationships, and it is the most honest lens through which to read her romantic choices.

Rory is not her mother, no matter how much Lorelai likes to think so.

Logan, while a rich party kid, which personally I think was fun and necessary to bring Rory out of her shell in undergrad, never tried to make Rory smaller. He has always felt she deserved to be in every room she walked into. He encouraged her to be her best while allowing her to choose what that looks like. Some people say he shouldn't have "let her take a year of Yale." First of all, "let" her? As if she doesn't have her own sense of agency. He supported her when she needed it, knowing she would return to school in her own time. He grows across the series in ways that Dean never does and Jess only begins to. Most importantly, he makes her happy in a sustainable way that is real, logical, and even romantically electric all at once.

The real reason Rory's relationship with Logan is so complicated can be traced back to her mom. Lorelai escaped the world Logan comes from and built something she's genuinely proud of for herself. The problem is that she projects her escape onto Rory in ways that aren't always fair. Rory can never make everyone happy, something she's been trying to do her whole life. Rory is not Lorelai, and no one seems to understand that but Logan.

Dean represents the world Lorelai chose, Jess represents the first love romantic ideal, and Logan represents the world Rory actually came from and has always been drawn to, even if she doesn't want to admit it to her mom.

For argument's sake, let's consider A Year in the Life, because it both complicates and confirms this. Rory circling back to Logan whenever her life feels unmoored is evidence that he is where she returns to when she feels lost. I'm not saying it's morally right, but it definitely sends that message. Jess gazing lovingly through the window at Rory at the end is very "the one that got away" romantic, and the show seems to want you to land there. But team Logan is the honest answer for a Rory who knows what she wants and is willing to admit it.

Dean was never going to be enough. Jess is the one that got away in the romantic imagination. Logan is the one who saw her fully, including the parts of herself she was still learning to claim.