About a decade ago I watched this movie about a sullen chick who'd sort of lost her way and ended up in an insane asylum with some actual crazies. That movie was called Girl, Interrupted and technically starred Winona Ryder but more importantly centered around her friend Lisa, played by Angelina Jolie. I was a weird 10 year old/ I'm still weird but I had a real fascination with mental illness and with how media sources portrayed people who are colloquially referred to as "nuts." I found it even more interesting that Angelina not only played an insane woman in film but also seemed to have a few screws loose in real life, as well. She was kissing her brother, having major Daddy issues, wearing a vile of blood and, most pitifully, dating Billy Bob Thornton.
Cut to about ten years later and now the woman is juggling 6 kids, a career as an action film star, her peace work in foreign countries and a sex life with Mr. Brad Pitt! Things have certainly changed for her but it's one particular moment in her life that gets my attention: the moment when she "stole" Brad Pitt from Jennifer Aniston.
I'm clearly a devotee of celebrity gossip and of celebrity interviews and I always remember hearing that Brad Pitt wanted children. In fact, I think there is an American law that determines that it would be a crime for him not reproduce. It's there in fine print somewhere, I swear. The man's gorgeous. Jennifer Aniston, on the other hand, clearly didn't want to: didn't wanna be pregnant and didn't want to adopt as evidenced by the fact that she hasn't done so in the five years since this all broke out. May sound harsh but any woman who says, "no, no Brad Pitt, I'm holding out for someone better to be the father of my children (biological or not)" can't have it all together. That might've been a fair excuse while she was starring on "Friends" but after it ended, they still stayed married without having any babies. Then entered Angelina.
The reason I'm thinking about this now is because last night, I was speaking with two friends about the movie Salt. They both agreed (in jest) that Angelina was wrong to have taken a woman's husband and it got me thinking. What right does any spouse have to deprive the other of a child? Alternatively, what right does a partner have to force the other person to be a parent if he or she doesn't want to? They wisely asked me why I assumed that she even could have kids or didn't want to have children. They suggested that maybe at one point towards the beginning of their marriage they both wanted to be childless but he changed his mind or that maybe they planned for children and then she decided against it. Maybe there were fertility issues involved. Whatever the case may be, I don't believe that two people who are in love have to or should stay together if they have radically opposing ideas about having children.
They could've adopted children or been foster parents. There are a multitude of ways for people to become parents. But a few definite ways not to be a parent include not getting pregnant and not taking in children who aren't biologically yours. In the Jennifer-Brad-Angelina triangle, it's clear that after he left Aniston, he chose (along with Jolie) to become parents to a brood of children. Clearly he wanted to be a parent: no man finds a woman with two adopted children, stays with her as she adopts another and then proceeds to procreate twice more with her if he isn't interested in the job.
In the conversation we had, my friends did the crucial job of asking me to illuminate my point and why I believed so fervently that this shift in relationships was understandable and just. I didn't make the judgment call because I think women should all be babymakers or that I was trying to claim that women who can't have children are somehow less than women. The truth is, I would make the same assertion if a woman wanted to have children and her male partner didn't. This is not, at it's core, a question of gender issues. To me, reproductive rights and fairness are the focus of this debate regardless of whether the person is a man or a woman. Not to go all creepy and morbid (i.e. Angelina circa 1999) but the fact of the matter is that we are all on this planet for a limited amount of time and the closest any of us gets to immortality, should we desire it, is by reproducing our DNA so that it can be passed on for generations and generations or by sharing our personality traits with adopted children.
With that said, I feel that every person has the right to choose the best scenario that either allows them to pursue this possibility or to decide that he or she has no interest in doing so. What I don't think should happen, is that a person has these options limited on account of who he or she is partnered with. If two people are going along fine until they hit this very important issue and realize they wanted two entirely different things, I don't believe that each of these individuals ought to be obligated to stay with his/her partner for the sake of maintaining a relationship.
By no means do I want to downplay the importance of the love and mutual devotion between couples but I don't think it's reasonable to claim that Brad did the wrong thing by leaving or that Angelina was a homewrecker. It's hard to break something, in this instance, a marriage, that is truly and honestly unshakeable. Pitt should not have cheated on Aniston (in fact, that was his true crime) but his decision to leave a woman with seemingly little interest in childrearing for someone who shared his desire to be a parent makes perfect sense to me. Should we really be deprived of children or forced to have them because the person we love has other interests? Actually, how can we believe someone truly loves us if he or she doesn't want us to do the best we can to get things we want out of life? What's up with that?
