“She’s sixteen”.

When Joey hits on Rory at Luke’s diner, Lorelai scares him off by telling him that Rory is sixteen. In fact she is fifteen, as her birthday is still around six weeks away. Lorelai must be the only mother in the world to put her teenage daughter’s age up when she is approached by an adult male.

Age in the Gilmore Girls is very fluid, and almost meaningless. Lorelai is in her early thirties, but acts like a teenager, yet was a teenager forced to grow up too fast. Rory is a teenager who acts like she’s in her thirties, and often seems completely at sea with normal teenage activities and customs. Characters’ ages are almost never mentioned, and birthdays are rarely talked about or seen celebrated. The age of Stars Hollow itself is something of a mystery, despite the clearly marked sign in the town square.

Time is one of the major themes of Gilmore Girls, with weeks and seasons clearly marked, and yet age as a concept barely exists, as if cycles of time occur and recur without affecting anyone, or as if the characters and towns exist in a sort of ageless dream-time.