I do not know Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie, however I do know divorce. I have spoken to almost 6000 divorcees, since starting DreamsRecycled. We as a nation love the Pitts with their clearly great chemistry, and stunning looking multicultural family. We were all rooting for them to make it, our American celebrity royalty, family built around love and children.
We put them on pedestals and in many ways hold them to a higher standards. Shouldn’t they have better chance of working things out? Who in their right mind we think would divorce either Brad or Angelina? They are genetically blessed, successful and wealthy. It also calls in to question the whole institution of marriage, as we question if these seemingly have everything celebrities, can’t make their marriages work then how can we possibly.
The truth is though that whether you are an Oscar winning actress or a regular non celebrity, an awful lot of the same marital issues are in play. All our marriages have many factors that go into them, each two people together will have a certain set of these factors, that make their marriage a certain way.
- We like to believe love conquers all, we like to also believe that being in love is forever, but often we fall out of love, or our love evolves into a more platonic love. Sometimes we realize that in fact we were more in lust than love even.
- We want to support each other’s careers, be there for each other every step of the way, but what if one or like the Pitts careers, both, are very time consuming and take you away from home often. What happens when your careers actually drive you away from the people you marry, it’s a common theme, whether in the military, airline industry or film industry, constant demands of being apart is hard to battle during a marriage.
- We don’t like to admit that children can drive us apart in our marriage, but it’s something I hear daily from divorcees. Being married and purely focused on each other’s needs is a lot easier to keep a marriage together, than when you start a family, and now all your attention, love time is divided between, your spouse and 1-2-3-4-5-6 as the Pitts children. There are only so many hours in the day to fill everyone’s needs, and rightly or wrongly as parents, I know I did, we shift that attention to fulfilling our children’s needs first, which can make our spouses feel neglected.
- Money can always be a battle field, it doesn’t matter if you have a ton of it or none of it, having two people who do not have the same thoughts, spending habits or ideas about money can lead to added stress.
- Spotlight on you, OK chances are we don’t have the spot light on us or our marriages like the Pitts do, but we can all relate to the feeling of having any external people trying to influence, or cause trouble within our own marriages. The Pitts may have Hollywood and the paparazzi but maybe we have in laws, family member, friends who exaggerate issues by putting a spot light on our partners or our shortcomings.
- Age gap-The Pitts are 11 years apart not a lot by celebrity standards, but study after study on marriages show, that the best chances of a marriage surviving your age gap has to be less than 5 years. Over 10 years your divorce chances increase 75% and over 20 years age gap 95% increase.
Seeing celebrities we adore marriages fail, always tugs at your heart strings some. Unless we were inside the Pitt-Jolie marriage like all divorces we will never really fully know what happened or why it did. What we can do though is, use these high profile celebrity divorces to help us do a checkup within our own marriages and relationships. Are we taking time to focus on each other? Are we fulfilling each other’s needs? Are we giving each other all the things we so readily and easily gave them at the start of our marriages? If the answer is no there is still time to fix this, seize the day, make changes and make filling your spouse’s needs once again your priority.
I don’t know what will lay ahead for the Pitt family, I personally just wish them and their children, a happy post-divorce life. Which takes work, but can be at times the only way to find a happier ever after.
.png)
