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In today’s Gilmore Girls episode, “P.S. I Lo…”, Rory ran away from home.

This after she called her mom a break-up girl, and that after Mr. Max Medina took her aside for a heart-to-heart about the breakup with Dean, and that after he described Henry James’s The Art of Fiction “a remarkable manifesto that contains basic truths that still apply to fiction in any form.”

Eh. I guess so. Actually, I found The Art of Fiction sometimes profound, sometimes uninspired, sometimes so ridiculous only an college graduate would be silly enough to believe it. Nonetheless, Max’s Old-Faithful impression did revive in me an old idea, to write and publish my own annotated versions of some classic books on writing fiction. Wouldn’t it be trés kewl to critique the advice of Henry James, Mark Twain, and Robert Lewis Stevenson, in print? But as usual, I’m getting off track.

When I first watched this episode, way back in the day, I stared aghast as Rory escaped to her grandparents’ house, without a word to Lorelai about where she was going.

And I began to rage as Emily did her own little butt-in, classic Emily Gilmore. Emily should have deferred to Lorelai’s judgement, as soon as they had each other on the phone. Instead, Emily argued with her. Of course, that’s Emily’s thing: to be a meddlesome bitch when it comes to Lorelai’s life. So what did I expect?

I guess this affects me so strongly, personally, because I have the opposite. My parents are extremely supportive of me and my brothers. And my father in particular has always made clear to me that how we run our lives, how we maintain our families, how we raise our children, all are our choices to make, even if we would choose differently than they. So as you can imagine, from the very first episodes, Emily rubbed me the wrong way.

(I eventually learned to sympathize with her. That’s a story for another time.)

But for Rory to up and disappear like that, against her mother’s wishes and without even telling Lorelai where she was going— I mean, I know teenagers have strong feelings, out-of-control impulses, which seem so very important to them at the moment. But that doesn’t justify running off like Rory did, which put Lorelai under a tremendous amount of stress, an order of magnitude more than Rory was feeling, for all her teenage angst. I have been both a teenager and the parent of a teenager, so I know of which I speak.

However, that didn’t mean that Rory and Lorelai don’t love each other anymore, either. Lorelai moaned to Max that she and Rory “always used to be able to work this stuff out.” And then later, she told Rory, “We have to be able to talk, always.” I’m not quite convinced that’s right. Just because Rory needed time out doesn’t mean she can’t talk to Lorelai; it just means she can’t talk right at that particular moment.

Sometimes we forget that truth, when someone we love seems to have cut off communication, that someone can want not to talk and still love you. Yes, there are persistent communication problems between some spouses or some parents and children. Yes, some relationships have a history of non-communication. (Like Lorelai’s and Emily’s.) But as someone who frequently needs to take a break from talking about stressful issues, especially when he’s under great personal strain, I can conclusively represent that these individual acts do not represent the way I feel or think about the relationship as a whole.

I myself have had to tell my wife to stop talking. And I have sometimes had to take long walks by myself, just to get away from the craziness that is my own home. That doesn’t mean I no longer love my wife and children. On the contrary, if I didn’t love them, I wouldn’t care what they said. Rather, because I care so deeply, what they say and do affects me deeply. And sometimes you just have to get away and take a break.

So Lorelai was right to give Rory her space, despite how insensitive was Rory’s behavior toward Lorelai. And see, they did work things out in the end after all.

-TimK