Jennifer Aniston has confessed that her relationships are "still a challenge" due to her parents' divorce.
The actress opened up about the issue during a new cover story interview with The Wall Street Journal in which she told the outlet that her love life is "sort of the one area that’s a little [lacking]" right now.
"Watching my family’s relationship didn’t make me kind of go, ;Oh, I can’t wait to do that,'" she said. "It was always a little bit difficult for me in relationships, I think, because I really was kind of alone."
"I didn’t like the idea of sacrificing who you were or what you needed, so I didn’t really know how to do that," she added.
The 54-year-old's mom, Nancy Dow, and dad, John Aniston, got divorced during her childhood and it seems as though the after-effects continue to cause ripples in her life.
"It was almost easier to just be kind of solo. So I didn’t have any real training in that give-and-take," she continued before adding that she was working on "not being afraid to say what you need and what you want," in a relationship.
"It’s still a challenge for me in a relationship," she concluded.
The former Friends star has been married twice before - the first being to Brad Pitt from 2000 to 2005 and the second to Justin Theroux which started in 2015 and subsequently ended in 2018, though she remains friends with both her exes.
While speaking to Elle, she described both her previous marriages as "successful" despite them coming to an end.
"My marriages, they’ve been very successful, in [my] personal opinion," the We're The Millers star said during a feature interview. "And when they came to an end, it was a choice that was made because we chose to be happy, and sometimes happiness didn’t exist within that arrangement anymore."
The actress then emphasized that she would not be living in a situation she didn't want to be in just out of the fear of being alone.
"To stay in a marriage based on fear feels like you’re doing your one life a disservice," she said. "When the work has been put in and it doesn’t seem that there’s an option of it working, that’s okay. That’s not a failure. We have these clichés around all of this that need to be reworked and retooled, you know? Because it’s very narrow-minded thinking."
And she had some wise words about how women should not be defined by their marital status because it diminishes their own accolades.
"You’re diminishing everything I have succeeded at, and that I have built and created," she told the outlet. "It’s such a shallow lens that people look through. It’s the only place to point a finger at me as though it’s my damage—like it’s some sort of a scarlet letter on me that I haven’t yet procreated, or maybe won’t ever procreate.”
"Everybody’s path is different," she added.
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