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Jennifer Aniston wants everyone to stop focusing on her love life: 'You’re diminishing everything I have succeeded at'

Jennifer Aniston wants the world to understand that she doesn’t need a man — and to stop projecting the 1950s “fairy tale” onto her life. “You’re diminishing everything I have succeeded at,” the actress said in an interview with Elle published on Friday.

The 49-year-old isn’t currently coupled up and doesn’t have children, two facts she’s perfectly content with. In fact, she finds it “narrow-minded” to think marriages that end in divorce are inherently failures.

“Why do we want a happy ending? How about just a happy existence? A happy process? We’re all in process constantly,” Aniston told Elle. “What quantifies happiness in someone’s life isn’t the ideal that was created in the ’50s. It’s not like you hear that narrative about any men.”

She explained that “it’s always the woman who’s scorned and heartbroken and a spinster. It’s never the opposite.” She’s certainly been cast in that light over the course of her career, especially after ending her marriage to Brad Pitt in 2005 and splitting with Justin Theroux in 2017.

Jennifer Aniston doesn’t need a man to be happy. (Photo: Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
Jennifer Aniston doesn’t need a man to be happy. (Photo: Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

But since announcing her separation with Theroux, Aniston has used the opportunity to address sexist stereotypes that all women want to get married and have children. A source told People in June that, despite the public’s concerns, the actress was “very happy being single.”

The same day the Elle interview dropped, a tabloid speculated that Aniston was pregnant with Pitt’s baby, perfectly proving her point that the media is obsessed with whether or not she’ll have kids.

“We live in a society that messages women: By this age, you should be married; by this age, you should have children,” Aniston told Elle. “That’s a fairy tale. That’s the mold we’re slowly trying to break out of.”

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