Jennifer Aniston has endured a public fascination into her personal life for decades. From her fairytale marriage to Brad Pitt and high-profile divorce to subsequent relationships and second marriage to Justin Theroux, the rumor mill never stops grinding. Part of this obsession, of course, is that the 53-year-old has never had children of her own, as if a woman in the public eye should have the audacity to remain childless.
Tabloids even went so far as to speculate that Aniston’s “choice” not to have children and “focus on her career” as the catalyst of her divorce from Pitt, who of course went on to share a half a dozen (now estranged, for what it’s worth) children with his second wife Angelina Jolie. And it certainly didn’t help that Pitt met Jolie while the couple were still married.
But after decades of speculation, Aniston is finally taking control of her own narrative. In a new interview with Allure published this week, the Friends actress alluded to having gone through a rough patch in her late 30s and 40s. When the interviewer pressed her to clarify, she revealed that it was due to her struggles with fertility.
“I was trying to get pregnant. It was a challenging road for me, the baby-making road,” says Aniston, of a period several years ago.
On the scale of dumb things to say, this is the moment when I really hit it out of the park. “I had no idea.”
“Yeah, nobody does,” she replies graciously. “All the years and years and years of speculation… It was really hard. I was going through IVF, drinking Chinese teas, you name it. I was throwing everything at it. I would’ve given anything if someone had said to me, ‘Freeze your eggs. Do yourself a favor.’ You just don’t think it. So here I am today. The ship has sailed.”
As difficult as one can imagine it was having gone through the fertility process to no avail, not to mention under an unforgiving spotlight, Aniston admits that she’s since made her peace with it.
“I have zero regrets,” she says. “I actually feel a little relief now because there is no more, ‘Can I? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.’ I don’t have to think about that anymore.”
Adding to the personal pain of what she went through was the “narrative that I was just selfish,” she says. “I just cared about my career. And God forbid a woman is successful and doesn’t have a child. And the reason my husband left me, why we broke up and ended our marriage, was because I wouldn’t give him a kid. It was absolute lies. I don’t have anything to hide at this point.”
“I’ve spent so many years protecting my story about IVF. I’m so protective of these parts because I feel like there’s so little that I get to keep to myself. The [world] creates narratives that aren’t true, so I might as well tell the truth. I feel like I’m coming out of hibernation. I don’t have anything to hide.”
Good for her. It’s a shame that Aniston had to deal with the endless speculation and accusations in the first place. But of course celebrity gossip culture was a very different beast even 10 or 20 years ago than it is today. If we’re being honest, we all owe an apology to Jennifer Aniston, who deserves to finally live her life in peace.
