Emily Gilmore personality type: ESTJ

Emily Gilmore goes through maids the way other people go through paper towels. A new face appears in that Hartford kitchen almost every season, usually fired for a mistake nobody else would notice. It is easy to laugh, and the show wants you to. Watch long enough, though, and you see a woman holding an entire world together with standards, because standards are the tools she was raised to use.

Even the deal at the heart of the show is a contract. She and Richard pay Rory’s Chilton tuition, and in return Lorelai and Rory show up for dinner every Friday night. That is the ESTJ in her: extraverted thinking runs the household like a company. She chairs committees, runs DAR events and throws parties with military precision, and her sense of tradition covers everything from a debutante ball to the way a proper table should be set.

Under the polish she is a Three with a Two wing. Threes need to be seen as successful, and Emily’s success is a perfect home, a perfect marriage and a perfect family, as presented to Hartford society. Lorelai’s teen pregnancy was a public crisis for her, not only a private one. That is why Richard’s secret lunches with his old flame Pennilyn Lott hit so hard. The image she built cracks, and she cannot forgive that easily. The Two wing is the part that wants to be needed by her family, even when she drives them away.

She also schemes, and more creatively than people expect. When Rory arrives at Yale, Emily and Richard throw a party to introduce her to suitable young men, which tells you exactly how Emily thinks love and success should be arranged. When she feels hurt, it comes out as criticism. When she feels proud, it comes out as a gift. The revival gives her the most growth of anyone. After Richard dies she stops pretending. She swears at her DAR friends, wears jeans, sells the house and moves to Nantucket, where she works at the whaling museum and seems to enjoy herself.

But: the best argument is that she is a 1, the strict perfectionist correcting everyone. That fits a lot of scenes. Still, her standards are about how things look to others, and when the image goes, so does her drive. That is the Three.