Because, deep down, we hope couples like Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt get back together
The idea of Brad returning to Jennifer reconciles us with our romantic failures.
Sooner or later it had to happen: you and your ex are both single again, at the same time. You met again by chance and you realized that between you it is never really over. Time has healed the wounds and made you forget the reasons why at the time it was right to end. What if in the meantime you realized that you've never forgotten (because let's face it, forgetting an ex is practically impossible)? If being alone, or with someone else, but above all not being with each other anymore, had made you understand that you are absolutely made to be together? These are legitimate doubts and to feed them there is an alleged flashback between ex, which is again making people talk.
The Phoenix effect: from the ashes of the relationship to the return of the flame
When Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt broke up because he cheated on her with Angelina Jolie, millions of women felt betrayed. Because, except in rare cases, we are all Jennifer: we are the normal girl who dreams of a cool stratospheric falling in love with her. It happened to Jen and Brad, but then came the fatalona, the unreachable, statuesque, superhuman Angelina Jolie, who with her wonderful lips and her doe eyes took him away.
After a first moment of shock, Angelina justified her: she is someone who plays in the same category as Brad Pitt. They really love each other. She started to like us: look how cute they are together with their thousand children. Okay, together they act terribly and probably Mr. & Mrs. Smith is the worst movie ever, but together they want to change the world, the third world above all and even a little bit the first. You see them in the photos where they look at each other as if they were the only two people on the face of the earth who know what love is. Their body language is unmistakable: they are the perfect match. They have everything that a normal couple excludes: puccipucci tenderness, panty-snatching passion and a life project together.
When all this perfection begins to be unbearable, here's the twist: they break up! What a relief, they are a normal couple. For a moment we thought it might work. And now that Jennifer is also divorcing Justin Theroux they can finally get back together and live happily ever after.
It will have happened to you too ... (or: because it's easier to look back)
It's the oldest story in the world: you and your ex start seeing each other again even though you already know it will never work. It didn't work before, why should it work now? Rationally, it doesn't make sense, but in a corner of your heart you hope for it.
Turning back when you can't look ahead is quite normal. The important story on which you have invested years of your life is over and you are in that strange limbo, made up of habits you have to get used to, of solitudes to fill. Of course, you are perfectly capable of being alone and when you don't feel like it there are friends (even if sometimes they involuntarily make you feel worse by saying the wrong thing), but the emptiness you feel is the chasm of the Love Story Over and there is only one person who can fill it. Someone who knows you well, someone with whom you have shared important pieces of life and who knows in which kitchen cabinet you keep Nutella. A person who knows how to get on your nerves but above all how to catch you.
That someone is your ex. Not just any ex, the one you never stopped loving or had an important relationship with. An ex-husband, if you have one. A first love. An ex with whom the push and pull went through a geological era. The kind of ex that requires the definite article.
An ex is much less demanding than a new one
When an important story ends, the last thing you need is to strip down on Tinder in search of another disappointment. You don't want to get involved in a serious relationship, but you don't want to have a guy around the house whose last name you don't even know and who you will probably never see again.
On the one hand, you want to go out with someone to prove something to yourself, whatever it is. On the other hand, you are still in the Bridget Jones stadium where the duvet is still your best friend and you temporarily have any esteem and confidence in the male gender: men are all assholes. The only relationship you are able to contemplate with a male person is the strictly professional one with your pilates teacher.
Time goes by, people change and sometimes in the second round the stories work
Going back to Jennifer and Brad, it's been 13 years since their divorce. Although they still look like two kids, they are two adults in their fifties. In all this time and from past relationships they must have learned something. Rumors say the two are in regular contact and have remained friends. They will probably stay that way and maybe that's for the best. Dreaming that they get back together reconciles you with the failure of your love story. If they get back together, then there is hope for all of us too.
The chances of your ex knocking on his knees on your door again, declaring that he can't live without you, aren't all that unrealistic. The odds of your story working are entirely up to you. Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth are a famous example: after 3 years of hiatus, their relationship seems to work much better than before. Selena Gomez, after breaking up with The Weeknd, is also back with Justin Bieber. To these fresh replay couples (we can't yet say for sure if they will live happily ever after) there are some, veterans, who have been proved right by time: Snoop Dog moved his high school sweetheart Shante Taylor, then they broke up and remarried about 10 years later. Pink and Carey Hart got married and broke up after only 2 years, only to get back together after a few months and have two children. Are the exceptions that prove the rule? Maybe. But they are also proof that if you want to make a story work, there's really nothing to stop you.
