No one told Justin Theroux his life was gonna be this way.
His job isn’t a joke. The guy definitely isn’t broke. And his love life, when it comes to Jennifer Aniston, was not DOA.
But the marriage was put to sleep back in February of this year, as the famous couple ended their union after two and a half years.
Did it die a slow and painful death, though?
The former Leftover lead has said next to nothing about his split from America’s Sweetheart, remaining almost entirely mum on the topic until speaking to The New York Times for an article that went viral on Saturday.
“The good news is that was probably the most – I’m choosing my words really carefully – it was kind of the most gentle separation, in that there was no animosity,” the 47-year old told the publication.
He added:
“In a weird way, just sort of navigating the inevitable perception of it is the exhausting part.”
That perception, of course, is that someone cheated.
Or there was some huge and ugly falling out.
Or, of course, that Aniston just wants to get back together with Brad Pitt and this romance was destined to fail.
Theroux and Aniston must have known that this is the sort of stuff people would say once they announced their divorce, so at least they were prepared to deal with the fallout.
In reality, however, Theroux says here that the break-up did not come about due to any one significant issue.
Rather, there were many small cracks that eventually led to an unfixable fissure.
“These are actually in reality small events that take place,” he said, explaining as best he could to The Times:
“But everything can feel like 10 on the Richter scale if you make the headline big enough and salacious enough.”
Sources at the time mostly blamed the split on different lifestyles and different visions of the future.
Aniston wanted to live full-time in Los Angeles, for example, while Theroux preferred New York.
Now, seven months later, Theroux says he’s adjusting well, noting that breakups in Hollywood are different because of what he refers to as a “kind of carny lifestyle” with frequent scenery changes.
“[It] doesn’t have that seismic shift of an ordinary couple, where everything is, like, you have to tear a baby in half,” he said.
“Neither one of us is dead, neither one of us is looking to throw hatchets at each other. It’s more like, it’s amicable. It’s boring, but, you know, we respected each other enough that it was as painless as it could be.”
That really is pretty boring.
Yet it also makes sense.
It must be challening to keep a spark lit when each half of the couple has such a busy schedule and is traveling so often.
“It was heartbreaking only in the sense that the friendship would not be the same, as far as just the day to day,” he concluded.
“But the friendship is shifting and changing, you know, so that part is something that we’re both very proud of.”
For her part, Aniston has clapped back against most of the BS out there.
“It’s pretty crazy,” she said in August. “The misconceptions are ‘Jen can’t keep a man,’ and ‘Jen refuses to have a baby because she’s selfish and committed to her career.
“Or that I’m sad and heartbroken.”
Having dealth with rumors about her womb and her love life forever and ever, Aniston rightfully went off this summer as follows:
First, with all due respect, I’m not heartbroken.
And second, those are reckless assumptions. No one knows what’s going on behind closed doors. No one considers how sensitive that might be for my partner and me.
They don’t know what I’ve been through medically or emotionally.
