Jennifer Aniston has opened up about having trouble getting pregnant

Jennifer Aniston has opened up about having trouble getting pregnant

Jennifer Aniston opened up about her struggle to get pregnant in her new cover story for Allure.

"I would say in my late 30s, 40s I had been through some really tough shit, and if I hadn't gone through that, I never would have become who I was supposed to be," she told the magazine. "That's why I'm so grateful for all of these shitty things. Otherwise I would have been stuck being this person who was so scared, so nervous, so unsure of who they were," she continued. “And now I don’t even fucking care.”

Aniston went further and revealed something that many have speculated (often unkindly) about for years. “I was trying to get pregnant,” Aniston said. “It’s been a challenging journey for me, the baby-making journey.”

Aniston tried every possible method to help her get pregnant without success, she shared. “I went through IVF, drank Chinese tea, you name it,” the actress said. "I threw everything at it. I would have given anything if someone had said to me, 'Freeze your eggs. Do yourself a favor.' You just don't think it. So here I am today. The ship has sailed."

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Despite everything, she has “zero regrets” about what she went through. "I actually feel a little relieved now because there's no more 'Can I? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe,'" she explained. “I don’t have to think about that anymore.”

In addition to the pain of not being able to have the baby she wanted, Aniston was also dealing with the public discourse about her private life. There was a "narrative that I was just being selfish," she told Allure. "I only cared about my career. And God forbid a woman be successful and not have a child. And the reason why my husband left me, why we separated and ended our marriage, was because I didn't want to give him a child. They were absolute lies. I have nothing to hide at this point."

Her frustration culminated in a 2016 op-ed for The Huffington Post in which Aniston spoke out against the media's treatment of her and other women in public. “For the record, I am not pregnant,” she wrote at the time. "What I am is fed up. I'm fed up with the sports-like scrutiny and body shaming that takes place daily under the guise of 'journalism,' 'First Amendment,' and 'celebrity news.'

Kelly Osbourne shared the type of body-shaming email she sees “daily.”

“I was so frustrated,” Aniston said in the recent cover story. "I thought, 'I just have to write this because it's so crazy and I'm not so superhuman that I can't let it penetrate and hurt.'"

Aniston used an essay to express herself in part due to her previous absence from social media. Although she's since joined Instagram, she's not a fan of the medium, she told Allure. “I hate social media,” she said, admitting that the only reason she created an account was to launch her hair care line, LolaVie.

"I'm really happy that we got to experience growing up, a teenager, in our 20s without that social media aspect," she said. "Look, the internet, great intentions, right? Connecting people socially, social networks. It goes back to how young girls think about themselves, compare and despair," Aniston explained.

Now she's focused on feeling comfortable exactly where she is. "I feel better about who I am today than I ever did in my 20s or 30s or even my mid-40s," Aniston said. And she had something to say to her future self: “You’ll be 65 one day and think I looked damn good at 53.”