What to Make of Jen and Brad’s Reconciliation

The SAG Award Recap (AKA Jen and Brad touched!)

 In case you missed it, Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt reconciled at the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Sunday, here’s what we can all learn from it.

This article was supposed to be about Sunday’s Screen Actors Guild awards. It was going to list the winners and losers, but no one is interested in that. No one cares about the best dressed or the worst dressed. There was no news or drama from the red carpet, we don’t really know who went.

There is one single aspect from the SAG Awards that has captured the hearts, minds and hopes of the public: Images of Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt re-uniting backstage.

 

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The images have gone well and truly viral. They have been shared across the globe and across social media platforms. The public are tantalised by what could have been, and what could maybe still be.

While this moment is an opportunity for the hopeless romantics among us to excite and fantasise about the possible rekindling of America’s golden couple, it represents much more than only this.

For fifteen years Jennifer Aniston has endured tabloid and magazine headlines depicting her as “poor Jen”, the jilted lover, unlucky in love and childless. She has been dismissed as merely a rom-com actress, re-inventing her Friend’s character for a plethora of harmlessly funny and inoffensive romantically based roles.

On Sunday night, as her ex-husband Brad Pitt watched on in the green room with tears in his eyes, Jennifer Aniston accepted her SAG award for her role in Morning Wars. It is a role for which Aniston has received much critical acclaim, for which she has earnt respect as an actress and proved nay-sayers wrong.

The images of Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt at the SAG awards shows us all that exes can be amicable; indeed, they can be friends. It shows us that success is not simple, nor defined by relationship status.

There is something that we can all take from these images and this reconciliation: to act with grace, to move on and move forward, and to strive for success and celebrate it, for ourselves and for others.