Despite both of her marriages ending in divorce, Jennifer Aniston considers them to have been “very successful.”
Well, that’s a healthy perspective.
Aniston, 49, opened up to Elle about her marriages to Brad Pitt and Justin Theroux, saying that success sometimes means having the strength to end things.
“I don’t feel a void. I really don’t. My marriages, they’ve been very successful, in (my) personal opinion,” she said. “And when they came to an end, it was a choice that was made because we chose to be happy, and sometimes happiness didn’t exist within that arrangement anymore.
“Sure, there were bumps, and not every moment felt fantastic, obviously, but at the end of it, this is our one life and I would not stay in a situation out of fear,” Aniston continued. “Fear of being alone. Fear of not being able to survive. To stay in a marriage based on fear feels like you’re doing your one life a disservice. When the work has been put in and it doesn’t seem that there’s an option of it working, that’s okay. That’s not a failure.”
Aniston and Theroux divorced earlier this year after two and a half years of marriage and seven years as a couple. She and Pitt were married from 2000-05.
The former “Friends” star added that two people staying together till death do them part is “a very romantic idea. It’s a very storybook idea. I understand it, and I think for some people it does work. And it’s powerful and it’s incredible and it’s admirable. Even enviable. But everybody’s path is different.”
The lengthy interview with Elle also covered the prospects of Aniston becoming a mother, something that she says she has always found “kind of frightening.”
“Some people are just built to be wives and have babies,” she said. “I don’t know how naturally that comes to me.”
She also said, “It’s such a shallow lens that people look through. It’s the only place to point a finger at me as though it’s my damage — like it’s some sort of a scarlet letter on me that I haven’t yet procreated, or maybe won’t ever procreate.”
Still, Aniston hasn’t entirely counted out the idea. “Who knows what the future holds in terms of a child and a partnership — how that child comes in … or doesn’t? And now with science and miracles, we can do things at different times than we used to be able to.”
