AS Jennifer Aniston celebrated her SAG awards victory last weekend, she couldn’t resist a quick reunion with Brad Pitt… And the world went absolutely bonkers.
The photos appeared — along with a video of Brad backstage watching Jen collect her award — and the internet basically fell into a Millennial meltdown as those of us old enough to remember the iconic duo (and their painful break-up) felt our cold, dead hearts being defibrillated by nostalgia.
The couple were together for six years, marrying two years after they met in 1998, before announcing their split in 2005, after Brad got together with Mr and Mrs Smith co-star Angelina Jolie.
Their relationship, its abrupt ending and Jen’s subsequent broken-hearted humiliation was obsessed over by the gossip columns and their hungry readers.
It’s why I was so shocked when my peers swooned over rumours of this rekindled romance — rather than doing as I was: hoping that Jen would remain strong, knowing her worth and steering clear of a man who simply didn’t know how good he had it.
All over the internet people willed her to forgive him and pick their relationship back up.
It’s like the alleged affair (which Pitt denies) and subsequent 15 years, marriages to different people and however many children didn’t happen. And that just felt wrong.
To hope that these two exes might be friends is one thing, but to hope that they’re back together, well that would be quite another.
Because in hoping for that, we’d be encouraging Jennifer Aniston to backslide two decades, forgiving a man that (reportedly) cheated on her with another woman, a woman he went on to leave her for and marry, and in doing so, to accept all of that as something she deserves.
Which of course, it isn’t.
And not just because she’s Jennifer Aniston, a goddess who literally does not seem to be ageing (honestly what is up with that?!), but because in taking Brad back, Jen would be setting a precedent for women everywhere.
One that says our “happily ever afters” can only really be achieved when we find the right man.
Since their split, Jen has been painted as the scorned woman.
As “Brangelina” conquered Hollywood and started building their (enormous) family, Jen has been pictured on the sidelines, still single as she turned 50 and still without children.
That alone is a concept that a lot of people struggle with; that a woman might be happy in her life without having procreated, the very thing that we were put on this earth to do (apparently).
As Brad and Angelina fell deeper in love and had more and more children, a picture was painted of Jen on the outside looking in at the life she could’ve had.
And of course when Brangelina fell apart in 2016, it was speculated that Jen had had something to do with it. And that she’d be waiting in the wings for him when he was single again.
As if she never moved on from the heartbreak that Brad inflicted all those years ago.
Which is a notion that is, quite frankly, insulting.
Not just to Jen but to every woman that has ever been left by a man.
At the time of the break-up the public were divided: Team Jen or Team Angelina. Who should Brad choose?
Fifteen years later, it would be nice to think that that decision could be made by the women it concerns, rather than a public that don’t know enough of the details, and a man who has actually – charm and ridiculously good looks aside – proven himself to be unworthy of both of them.
If if he needed to hammer the point home, just imagine how Angelina will feel after he joked about their failed marriage on-stage on Sunday.
I hope that Brad and Jen are close friends, as they promised they’d remain in their split announcement back in 2005, and that that was all that we saw in those photos over the weekend.
Because contrary to everything we’ve been led to believe, it is possible for a woman to be better off without a man.
Even if that man is Brad Pitt.
