For a long time, one of Hollywood’s most pressing questions was why Jennifer Aniston didn’t have children. It was right up there with why they ever did a second Sex and the City film and how Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriends always seemed to stay 25.
Nobody could work it out: after all, the Friends star was America’s sweetheart. She had great hair, a flourishing acting career, and, for a while, an equally famous husband in the form of Brad Pitt. All she needed to achieve certification, according to society’s Good Woman Handbook, was a child – ideally several.
But Aniston didn’t conform – cue decades of vicious rumours, creating a narrative that positioned the actress as an avaricious, career-hungry monster devoid of the empathy required to be a good mother.
It followed her in every relationship after her divorce from Pitt, which many speculated happened because she didn’t want children, and remained inexorably tied to the 56-year-old’s public profile regardless of her continued professional success. Now, after addressing the speculation in a 2016 op-ed for The Huffington Post, Aniston has revealed just how much damage all this caused her, explaining that she’d been dealing with fertility issues.
“They didn’t know my story, or what I’d been going through over the past 20 years to try to pursue a family, because I don’t go out there and tell them my medical woes,” the actress told Harper’s Bazaar. “That’s not anybody’s business. But there comes a point when you can’t not hear it – the narrative about how I won’t have a baby, won’t have a family, because I’m selfish, a workaholic. It does affect me – I’m just a human being.”
Reading these quotes made me angry for several reasons. Firstly, because yet another successful woman had been judged, scrutinised, and pigeonholed for not fitting into the extremely limited mould society has created for her. And secondly, because she felt compelled to share private medical information so as to rally against assumptions nobody had the right to make.
But it also made me angry on a personal level. Because even though, as a single 31-year-old woman, I’m a while away from even considering children, the pressures and anxieties that Aniston has been forced to confront mirror my own, as well as those of my single female friends.
I’ve lost count of the number of times my married friends have asked if I want children some day. I know they mean well. But whenever I’m asked the question, I can’t help but feel a stab of indignation at the societal assumptions that underpin it. On the one hand, saying “no” could result in an Aniston-adjacent characterisation, casting me as a career-obsessed loner. But saying “yes” can be equally miserable, because with no partner, no financial stability, and a flatshare, I can only currently contemplate kids in a fictional version of my life.
There’s also the fertility noise of it all; what if someone asked me that while, like Aniston, I was actually trying and struggling to conceive? Would I owe anybody that information? How about if I’d had a miscarriage that I was recently recovering from? And what if, aged 23, I’d had an abortion after being sexually assaulted, something that rendered the prospect of being pregnant again utterly terrifying and bound up with all sorts of deep-rooted sexual trauma?
Yes, that really happened – and I don’t feel it’s something I ought to be reminded of when someone I went to university with is trying to make small talk with me at a wedding (seriously, why do people always ask single women if they want kids at weddings?).
Nobody should be making assumptions about why a woman does – or does not – have children. As Aniston exemplifies, we never really know what’s going on behind the scenes, nor should we need to. Surely in 2025, it’s time we respected that.
