Brad Pitt Talks Jennifer Aniston and "Trying to Pretend the Marriage Was Something That It Wasn't"

Actor muses on how his work used to be an escape from reality and how his marriage "had something to do with it"

The Brad Pitt-Jennifer Aniston postmortem continues, this time courtesy of the ex-husband himself.

After spending the 1990s "trying to hide" from celebrity madness, the two-time Sexiest Man Alive said that he "started feeling pathetic" and looked to his movie roles to fill a void left by the lackluster life he was leading.

His five-year marriage included, apparently.

"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 says in the upcoming issue of Parade. "I think that my marriage had something to do with it, trying to pretend the marriage was something that it wasn't."

But now that he's thoroughly committed to his family with Angelina Jolie, Pitt says, life is quite lovely.

"I'm satisfied with making true choices and finding the woman I love, Angie, and building a family that I love so much," the Tree of Life star says.

"A family is a risky venture, because the greater the love, the greater the loss...That's the trade-off. But I'll take it all."

Ironically, the journalist who interviewed Aniston extensively for Vanity Fair back in 2005 after the divorce was finalized, recalled Pitt saying to her barely a year beforehand, "I'm happier than I've ever been."

Of course, according to Pitt now, he wasn't that happy.

"One of the greatest, smartest things I ever did was give my kids Angie as their mom," he tells Parade. "She is such a great mom. Oh, man, I'm so happy to have her." And, in case you couldn't tell, they're not breaking up anytime soon.

"I mean, how many stories have you read that aren't true, stories about me and Angie being married or fighting or splitting up?" he wonders. "And when we don't split up, there's a whole new round that we've made up and we're back together again! We'll get married when everyone can. We're not splitting up. And we don't have a seventh child yet."

Aniston also told Vanity Fair back in 2005, "It's been very important for me not to read anything, not to see anything. It's been my saving grace. That stuff is just toxic for me right now. I probably avoided a lot of suffering by not engaging in it, not reading, not watching."

Who knew, six years later, those would still be words to live by?