Why Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston really split – and it wasn’t just Angelina Jolie

Hollywood’s former golden couple Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston married in 2000 but divorced in 2005 after just five years of marriage

Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston would have celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary this week if they’d stayed toegther.

Sadly, Hollywood’s golden couple were never meant to be as they divorced in 2005 after just five years of marriage.

Many believe the relationship went wrong when Brad fell head over heels in love with Angelina Jolie while he was still married to Jen.

But there was also Jen’s growing doubts about the marriage, their rows over whether to have children and the growing pressures of their enormous fame.

Here we examine why it all went wrong for Brad and Jen…

Angelina Jolie

The most commonly held belief about why Brad and Jen split was that he left her for Angelina Jolie.

Brad met Angelina on the set of Mr & Mrs Smith in 2004 and they quickly fell in love.

Angelia said they weren’t looking to be together but formed a close bond on set.

She told People in 2008: “I think we found this strange friendship and partnership that kind of just suddenly happened. I think a few months in I realised, God, I can’t wait to get to work.”

When they announced their breakup, Brad and Jen insisted there was no third party involved.

But just a month after Jen filed for divorce, Brad and Ange were seen on holiday together frolicking on the beach.

She would tell Vogue in 2008: “There was stuff printed there that was definitely from a time when I was unaware that it was happening.

“I felt those details were a little inappropriate to discuss. That stuff about how she couldn’t wait to get to work every day? That was really uncool.”

The former couple, who came to be known as Brangelina, would go on to marry in 2014 before Angelina filed for divorce in 2016.

While many blame Angelina for the breakup, the cracks were already there in Brad and Jen’s marriage before he’d even met Ange.

In a 2003 interview with W Magazine, Jen revealed her doubts about the relationship.

She said: “Is he the love of my life? I think you’re always sort of wondering, ‘Are you the love of my life?’ I mean, I don’t know, I’ve never been someone who says, ‘He’s the love of my life.’

“He’s certainly a big love in my life…And I know that we have something special, especially in all this chaos. In this nutty, brilliant, wonderful, hard business that we have, it’s nice to have somebody who’s anchored and knows you, really knows all of you.”

Jen also hinted at the stresses and strains of marriage.

She told Diane Sawyer: “Love is work. And so you gotta make your choice – if that’s what [is] most important to you.”

Fame drove them apart

Brad became a huge star in the nineties and with Jen’s fame from playing Rachel in Friends, they were considered to be one of the hottest couples in he world.

But he later admitted that he struggled to cope with all the attention on them and would often hide out at home smoking weed to escape it.

“I spent the ’90s trying to hide out, trying to duck the full celebrity cacophony. It wigged me out a bit,” he told Parade in 2011.

“I started to get sick of myself sitting on a couch, holding a joint, hiding out. It started feeling pathetic. It became very clear to me that I was so intent on trying to find a movie about an interesting life, but I wasn’t living an interesting life myself.

“I think that my marriage had something to do with it… Trying to pretend that the marriage was something that it wasn’t.”

Rows about having kids

Just months Brad began filming for Mr & Mrs Smith, Jen said she was ready to have children.

Friends had come to an end and she thought it was the right time in her career.

But it’s claimed Brad wasn’t ready to have children, with a source telling Vanity Fair at the time: “When Brad and Jen were in the marriage, having a baby was not his priority – ever. It was an abstract desire for him, whereas for Jen it was much more immediate.”

Brad with Pax, Shiloh and Maddox(Image: AFP via Getty Images)

There were also reports at the time that the opposite was true and Brad was the one who wanted kids.

When they got together, he adopted Ange’s son Maddox and they would go on to adopt Zahara and Pax.

They also had three of their own biological children: Shiloh and twins Knox and Vivienne.