Jennifer Aniston isn’t “poor Jen” — she’s one of Hollywood’s ultimate survivors

Poh Jen.” That was the phrase that followed Jennifer Aniston not long after her divorce from Brad Pitt. One minute the friends Star was one half of a Hollywood golden couple and the owner of the most coveted haircut in the world. Next, she was an spinster whose husband dumped her for his sexy co-star. Would she ever find happiness? Would her own biological clock beat her? A public fixation on who she was dating or whether she would have children felt like a coded way to wonder if she would ever muster the ability to overcome the humiliation. But this week, Aniston destroyed the narrative.

She revealed ongoing rumors that she’s too “selfish” or “career-obsessed” to be a mom Curls that she had tried for years to have a child but was unsuccessful. Now she’s accepted that biological motherhood isn’t something that’s going to happen for her, telling the publication, “The ship has sailed.” Despite the struggles, Aniston, 53, says she now “feels better than ever in my 20’s or 30’s or even in my mid 40’s”. Poor Jens? Don’t patronize them. She is one of Hollywood’s ultimate survivors.

Aniston had cause for frustration. In fact, it’s surprising that she didn’t speak up sooner. In the years of Brangelina’s heyday — Pitt and Angelina Jolie were together 11 years and married four before their acrimonious split in 2017 — it was hard to find a newsstand that didn’t have a front-page story about how Aniston was managing and how she would have ever gotten over her divorce. Choosing to keep her advice, she maintained a dignified silence during the tabloid stories. Your professional success, including The Separation In 2006 he earned over $200 million (£170 million) worldwide. Marley and I Breaking the Christmas card record in 2008 felt secondary — all conversations were consumed by her personal life in a way that felt more specific and personal than many other female stars.

As later relationships with Vince Vaughn and John Mayer faltered, it was more fodder for the Poor Jen machine — an example of how their lives were turned sour by the incredibly normal phenomenon of dating and moving on. While some may have collapsed under the pressure of using her life as a public spectacle, Aniston kept her head up and never relented in nurturing the chatter.

The pity party appeared to be giving final orders in 2015 when she married Justin Theroux after four years together. Well, poor Jen at last had another legal relationship with a man, surely that would mean the end of worrying about her life? But it only led to more questions about what would come next: if they would start having children, and when, why, and how. It came to a head in 2016 when Aniston a HuffPost She wanted to speak about paparazzi camping outside her home hoping to get a shot to confirm her “pregnancy.” No, she didn’t expect, she said, and she didn’t need to have a child on the way for her life story to have value.

“Here I come out on this subject: We are complete with or without a partner, with or without a child,” Aniston wrote. “We can decide for ourselves what is beautiful about our body. That choice is ours and ours alone.” Aniston told us at the time that she didn’t need or want to be pitied. The fact that she felt compelled to make such a statement now that we know about her experience with IVF feels even more cruel. When her marriage to Theroux ended in 2017, she had to correct yet another spate of Poor Jen headlines. “First of all, with all due respect, I’m not heartbroken,” she said InStyle in 2018. “And secondly, these are reckless assumptions. Nobody knows what goes on behind closed doors.”

While she was grappling with the press trying to box her in to cower with shame and coming to terms with unsuccessful IVF, Aniston entered a new phase in her career that will see her status as anything else as a victim further cemented. With producer Kristin Hahn, she runs Echo Films, a company that has made films like cake and dumplings – Projects They’ve Seen feature some of their strongest performances to date. In the Emmy-winning Apple TV+ series The morning show, Aniston and Reese Witherspoon serve as leads and executive producers. Aniston not only has the show’s third season to look forward to, but she also has two more films in the pipeline and a hit hair care line.

Unfortunately, sexism means that despite a woman’s professional success, finding a partner and having children is still considered the “ultimate goal”. It still seems to be the thing that decides whether it’s considered inspiration or proof of the theory that it’s impossible to “have it all”. How insulting that Aniston had to face such treatment when he had so much to be proud of.

The fact that she’s faced all of her setbacks and is instead embracing the positive in her life is something that needs to be celebrated, not with condescending sighs. Aniston is a Hollywood survivor because she knows that if you want to achieve something, you have to do it yourself. She proved it again this week when she ended the ‘Poor Jen’ narrative once and for all. Here she hopes that she never has to do this again.