Who Does Rory End Up With In Gilmore Girls?

In 2000, audiences were first introduced to mother and daughter Lorelai and Rory Gilmore — played by Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel — and their life in the fictional small town of Stars Hollow thanks to Amy Sherman-Palladino's series "Gilmore Girls." Across seven seasons (in the original series), Lorelai and Rory both evolve quite a bit; Lorelai begins the show working at a local inn and owns her own upscale bed and breakfast by the time it ends, and Rory kicks off the series by attending the prestigious Chilton Academy for high school and then graduating from Yale University in the final season. Along the way, both of the titular Gilmore Girls find and lose love — so who does Rory date?

Throughout "Gilmore Girls," Rory has three main love interests: Dean Forester, Jess Mariano, and Logan Huntzberger (played by Jared Padalecki, Milo Ventimiglia, and Matt Czuchry, respectively). Thankfully, the show got a Netflix revival in 2016 — "A Year in the Life," spread across four seasonally appropriate 90 minute "episodes" — to clear up some lingering questions about Lorelai and Rory's respective romantic prospects, but there are still some mysteries about who Rory ends up with after the revival comes to a close. With that in mind, let's go over all of Rory's boyfriends on "Gilmore Girls," look at the timeline, and see where she ends up in the final, autumnal installment of "A Year in the Life."

Just as soon as she's all set to leave Stars Hollow High School for Chilton Academy, Rory literally bumps into Dean, a tall and ostensibly handsome boy new to the small town — and sparks fly right away. Despite going to different schools, the two start dating early in Season 1 of the series, but break up abruptly on the night of their three-month anniversary when Dean tells Rory that he loves her and she doesn't say it back. They reunite in the season finale and date through Season 2 and break up in Season 3 after a new boy comes to town and captures Rory's attention (more in that shortly), but unfortunately, they reunite in Season 4.

Why is their reunion so unfortunate? Well, in Season 4 of "Gilmore Girls," Rory is a freshman at Yale University ... and Dean is married to Lindsay (played by Arielle Kebbel). In that season finale, while Lorelai celebrates the opening of her very own inn, Rory and Dean sleep together for the first time ever even though he's married, causing a major rift between Rory and Lorelai when the latter comes home and finds them getting dressed. Dean and Rory try to date for a while, but it doesn't work with her at Yale and him in Stars Hollow; eventually, they realize that they come from different worlds and want different futures, and they (finally) break up for good.

In Season 2 of "Gilmore Girls," Jess Mariano — the nephew of local diner owner and Lorelai's future boyfriend Luke Danes, played by Scott Patterson — comes to live with Luke in Stars Hollow, and despite Jess' decidedly bad attitude, his obvious intelligence and undeniable good looks charm Rory pretty quickly. The problem is, she's still dating Dean — who hates Jess — so aside from a spontaneous and surprising kiss in the Season 2 finale, Jess and Rory mostly keep their distance from each other. This all comes to a head in the standout Season 3 episode "They Shoot Gilmores, Don't They?" as Rory and Lorelai compete in an all-night dance competition, and right on the dance floor, Dean calls Rory out for her extremely obvious crush on Jess and breaks up with her. Rory and Jess don't really waste any time; a few episodes later, they're definitively dating.

Milo Ventimiglia left the series at the end of Season 3 — despite the fact that one of the season's final episodes, "Here Comes the Son," is a backdoor pilot for a Jess-centric show that was clearly never picked up by The WB — so Jess and Rory break up, but Jess returns a handful of times. In Season 4, Jess briefly returns to Stars Hollow, tells Rory he loves her, and begs her to run away with him (only to get turned down), and after that, the two fall out of touch for quite some time. Thankfully, Jess shows up when Rory needs his wisdom the most in Season 6; upon finding out that Rory dropped out of Yale, Jess is furious with her and criticizes her for wasting the opportunity and her potential. Thanks in large part to Jess, Rory ends up returning to Yale, and she goes to see him in Philadelphia to thank him for his support. The two share a kiss, but because Rory is still in love with someone else, the situation doesn't go any further and the two leave things on good terms.

Rory first meets fellow Yale student — and super-wealthy heir to a media fortune — Logan Huntzberger in Season 5 while she's carrying on a long-distance relationship with Dean, and to say she doesn't like him very much is a severe understatement. After a while, Rory warms to Logan — particularly after he helps her with a huge piece on a secret society at Yale by sneaking her into a super-exclusive event — and in the aftermath of her conclusive breakup with Dean, Rory starts to seriously consider Logan as a romantic possibility. Despite Logan's hesitations and protestations — he tells Rory that he's not "boyfriend material" but that she is definitely "girlfriend material" — the two start dating, and things get serious pretty fast.

Logan and Rory do face a number of obstacles fairly early in their relationship, though. When Logan reluctantly brings Rory to a dinner at the Huntzberger family home, his mother and grandfather basically say Rory isn't good enough to marry Logan and "become" a Huntzberger, much to her chagrin (after asking if they "know" she's a "Gilmore," Rory exclaims, "My ancestors came over on the Mayflower!"). Logan's powerful father Mitchum (Gregg Henry) gives Rory an internship at a newspaper he owns in an attempt to smooth things over, but after he tells her she doesn't have "what it takes" to be a journalist, Rory flips out, convinces Logan to help her steal a yacht, gets arrested, receives community service as a sentence, and drops out of Yale (albeit temporarily). 

Rory and Logan, who only briefly "broke up" once, stay relatively strong until Rory learns that Logan was with other girls during their "break;" she ends things, but the two reunite shortly thereafter. The two basically date steadily from that point on until the end of the series, when Logan proposes, but Rory turns him down and leaves Stars Hollow to follow Barack Obama on the campaign trail for his first presidential campaign. (Yes, this show is old.)

Okay, so the "official" answer to the question "who is Rory dating in the 'Gilmore Girls' revival?" is that she's in a longterm relationship with a random guy named Paul (played by Jack Carpenter), but considering that it's a running gag in "A Year in the Life" that Rory (and her friends and family) keep forgetting Paul even exists, we're not including him on this list. In fact, Rory isn't only dating Paul in the revival; early on, we learn that every time she goes to London to work as a freelance journalist and ghostwriter, she's not staying with a "friend," which is the lie she tells to Lorelai. She's actually staying with Logan, who lives in London ... and has a fiancée in Paris.

It's then revealed that, for a number of years, Rory and Logan have been having a relatively casual affair whenever they're on the same side of the Atlantic Ocean (they have a "regular" restaurant they visit in London before Rory's return trips to the States, for example). In "A Year in the Life," though, it's clear that the clock is finally starting to tick in that Logan's wedding to the unseen Odette is actually approaching, and in the final episode "Fall," Logan, Rory, and a handful of their raucuous college friends have a final night of debauchery together before Rory ends their relationship, ostensibly for good.

So what about Jess and Dean? She does run into both of them in the revival. Dean is married (not to Lindsay anymore) with children, and Rory gets the opportunity to thank him for being a great first boyfriend (which is, frankly, debatable). As for Jess, he plays a sizable role in "A Year in the Life" despite pretty limited appearances in that he encourages Rory to take a huge creative and professional leap.

To be perfectly frank, Rory is a total freaking mess in "Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life." Not only does she not have a permanent place to live — until she officially moves back into Lorelai's house in Stars Hollow shortly into the miniseries — but she keeps forgetting about her real boyfriend Paul, has a shady arrangement with her ex-boyfriend Logan, and, aside from one article in The New Yorker, isn't having much professional success. After pitching an article about lines for everything from baked good to sneakers to collectible action figures in New York City, Rory goes rogue and sleeps with a guy in a Wookiee costume, and after being aggressively courted by a website called Sandee Says, Rory shows up to the interview with Sandee herself ("Bunheads" alum Julia Goldani Telles) with zero pitches or ideas. To say Rory is flailing in her early 30s is a severe understatement, but after she ends up back in Stars Hollow and reconnects briefly with a visiting Jess, she comes up with an idea: she wants to write a memoir about her life with her mother.

Jess is, without question, the one who inspires and champions this idea, and despite Lorelai's complete reluctance, she eventually agrees to let Rory write about Lorelai's evolution from a single teenage mother to the owner of a successful inn ... and the years the two Gilmore girls spent together trying to make everything work. (It's also quite obvious, throughout Jess' time on-screen, that he's majorly carrying a torch for Rory after all these years.) At the end of the revival, Lorelai and Rory share a quiet moment — after Lorelai and Luke's long-awaited, spontaneous wedding — at which point Rory utters four words (specifically, the four words Amy Sherman hoped would close the original series). "Mom?" Rory says. "Yeah?" Lorelai responds. "I'm pregnant," Rory replies. Cut to black.

So will we ever get a resolution to Rory's big reveal at the end of "Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life" or see a continuation of the story? As of this writing, there are no plans to revive or reboot "Gilmore Girls," though a few members of the core cast — including Lauren Graham, Scott Patterson, and Sean Gunn — did reunite for a Walmart commercial in 2024. Basically, at the end of "A Year in the Life," Rory doesn't end up with anybody, and we aren't explicitly told who fathered her baby.

The answer, though, is Logan. Even though Matt Czuchry tried to play coy about the whole thing and claim he couldn't say whether or not Logan is the father, in 2023, "A Year in the Life" costume designer Valerie Campbell weighed in on the whole thing in a series of TikTok videos (via Entertainment Weekly). ""The only obvious choice is — you guessed it — Logan," Campbell said in the first video; in a follow-up, she said, "If it was Paul, she would've had the baby in the 'Fall,' if it was the Wookiee, she would've been about to burst." Campbell also revealed that even Amy Sherman-Palladino found it baffling that anyone didn't think Logan was the father, saying the answer is "supposed to be very, very, very, very, very obvious."

We may or may not ever see Rory Gilmore as a mother, but the point is this: Rory is 32 in the revival, and Lorelai was 32 in the very first episode of "Gilmore Girls." Rory's pregnancy truly brings the story of the Gilmore girls full circle as Rory prepares to, presumably, become a single mother, so if we never see what Lorelai and Rory get up to after that final scene in the gazebo, that's okay, because their arc is complete.

"Gilmore Girls" and "Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life" are both streaming on Netflix now.