Why Do We Root For Celebrity Couples To Get Back Together?
“Have you seen those photos of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston?” my sister asked me casually over the long weekend.
Um, of course I had. Logging onto Facebook Sunday night, doing that obligatory “bored-on-the-weekend” scroll, I couldn’t escape the posts about the exes’ backstage run-in at the 2020 Screen Actors Guild Awards. (And I kid you not, at least three of the articles had “breaking news” tags. Relax, news orgs.)
Granted, they are pretty great photos. Let’s recap:
Backstage, congratulating each other for acting-award wins for their respective roles in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” and “The Morning Show,” the former husband and wife were positively beaming.
Alexa, play “The Way We Were.” (There is something vaguely Katie Morosky/Barbra Streisand and preppy Hubbell Gardiner/Robert Redford about the way they look, right?)
“Yeah, I saw them!” I told my sister, pulling them up again just for good measure. “They were everywhere.”
But just as I was getting my Google image search on, I got reality checked.
“Weren’t there all these rumors he cheated on her with Angelina Jolie?” my sister said with the ignorant bliss of a younger sibling who was in elementary school when it all (allegedly!) went down.
Oh, dammit, yeah. Aniston and Pitt broke up in 2005 after five years of marriage and rumours that the actor had fallen for his “Mr. And Mrs. Smith” co-star, leading Aniston to famously tell Vanity Fair that Pitt was “missing a sensitivity chip.” Ouch.
The “poor Jen!” headlines became a tabloid fixture. “Team Aniston”/“Team Jolie” shirts became a weird early aughts pop culture thing. Pitt and Jolie eventually married and raised a family of six before splitting up in messy fashion in 2016. Aniston went on to marry and amicably divorce Justin Thoreux (so amicable, they celebrate Thanksgiving together).
Now, they’re racking up awards for their work and both conveniently single at the same time,...
