Flashback: Pre-Pitt Aniston on Unrequited Love
After a few highly publicized relationships without fairytale endings, Jennifer Aniston is now on the brink of her second marriage, which is rumored to be just around the corner. Let's take a trip back to when the actress' first major relationship in the limelight was just about to begin and she shares her unique thoughts on love.
Most are suckers for a good love story with a relatively predictable linear plot and a climactic, pleasant ending. Not Jennifer Aniston, though. She prefers quite the opposite, as she revealed on this day in 1998, two months before she began dating Brad Pitt.
"Many women that I know have had an experience like that or similar to that where you love someone and it just doesn't come back necessarily the way you want it to," she says in an interview for the romantic comedy The Object of My Affection. "For some reason I always like those tragic...love stories--I don't know why--where it doesn't work out, necessarily."
Although she enjoys watching a tragic story of unreciprocated love or playing it out on the big screen, Aniston admits that it's tough to experience in real life.
"You just have to move through it," she says of unreciprocated love. "It's a growing pain. It's one of those life experiences that only you can gain something from...in some way. At the time, it doesn't feel that way. It just feels like the worst, most painful situation you could ever be in. ...[You're thinking] 'I'm never going to make it through,' but you do. We all survive."
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Aside from love, the then-29-year-old actress discusses her longevity as an actress. Although she has sustained her star power over the years, there was some uncertainty at the time as to if Aniston, and the remainder of the Friends cast, would succeed after their hit series ended.
She wisely assesses her career with perspective and stresses the importance of selecting the proper roles for her in the future. As Aniston phrases it, she doesn't want to be "flavor of the month."
Despite the inherent uncertainty of the future, the actress who brought the buoyant "Rachel Green" to life on Friends reveals a confident outlook for her future in Hollywood.
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"Like anything, you take the good with the bad," she says of her experience so far as an actress. "I'm really happy. I'm really lucky, but it's also the tip of the iceberg. It's just begun. There's so much farther to go and so much more to learn and so much more to conquer."