Brad Pitt And Angelina Jolie Didn't Plan On Hooking Up And Betraying Jennifer Aniston

Fans were shocked in 2005 when news broke out that Hollywood’s then “it couple” Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt have decided to call it quits after four years of seemingly blissful marriage. But a bigger shock soon followed — the reason for the divorce was actually Angelina Jolie.

Understandably, angry fans blamed Jolie for ruining Aniston and Pitt’s marriage, and she was branded as a man stealer. But what fans failed to consider was that Jolie shouldn’t be made to carry all the blame as there were other factors at play as well.

The most compelling reason Jolie shouldn’t have been blamed too much is that neither she nor Pitt actually planned to hook up in the first place — it just happened. In Pitt’s case, he was not looking for love at that time since he was already married to Aniston.

Jolie was not looking for love either. Though single then after having been divorced from Billy Bob Thornton in 2003, she was busy raising her son, Maddox, who was just two years old at that time. “Brad was a huge surprise to me,” was her apt description of how meeting Pitt caught her emotionally unprepared during an interview with Vogue in 2007.

Jolie even acknowledged that neither she nor Pitt was looking for romance when they started filming “Mr. And Mrs. Smith” as they were already satisfied with their lives. “I think we were both the last two people who were looking for a relationship,” the actress said. “I certainly wasn’t. I was quite content to be a single mom with Mad.”

The actress went on to explain how things progressed without her recognizing that she was slowly starting to fall in love with Pitt. “Because of the film we ended up being brought together to do all these crazy things, and I think we found this strange friendship and partnership that kind of just suddenly happened,” she added.

It was only when the movie was finished filming when they fully realized what they felt for each other. “And it took until, really, the end of the shoot for us, I think, to realise that it might mean something more than we’d earlier allowed ourselves to believe,” Jolie said.

While Aniston and Pitt’s marriage seemed fine at the surface, there were already indications that it was not as perfect as it appeared. Brad Pitt would later on tell Parade that he was no longer happy with their arrangement at that point.

“It became very clear to me that I was intent on trying to find a movie about an interesting life, but I wasn’t living an interesting life myself,” Pitt told the publication. “I think that my marriage [to actress Jennifer Aniston] had something to do with it. Trying to pretend the marriage was something that it wasn’t.”