"And Friends are Friends forever...."

Not to sound like a broken record, but I guess I am still confused about America's fascination with pop culture icons and their relationships. The question I pose today specifically is... what makes YOU think YOU know Jennifer Anniston? I guess most of the country feels as though they have grown up with her and that she is on of their close, personal friends because of her role as Phobe on Friends. I personally only watched perhaps three episodes of the show in my entire life, and I'm ont sure I watched them completely. It doesn't really matter to me that Joey's ex-wife was a lesbian, or that Chandler and Rachel were dating and Ross was an actor and Rachel's brother. I couldn't care less about the the machinations of these people and their lives. It really means nothing to me.
However it does matter to a lot of people. I realize that I am in the minority and that Friends was a powerful force in our culture. In fact there are some people who are reading this right now that are going crazy that I mixed up the names and relationships of the fictious people in this show in the last paragraph, as if they know them personally and they actually exist. (These are the same people who make statements like "Did you see Ross in that movie about dead people?" refusing to call David Schwimmer by his self chosen fake stage name) What is perhaps even crazier than that is that I, someone who really hated the show and never completed one episode, someone who actively tries to stay away from anything to do with Friends, know that it is Ross (Schwimmer) and Monica (Courtney Cox) who are siblings, that it was Ross who married the lesbian and dated Rachel (Anniston), that Joey (LeBlanc) was the actor and also dated Rachel, and that Phobe (Kudrow, not Anniston as I suggested earlier) was a surrogate mother and optimistically dense (or perhaps densely optimistic). The point is that no matter how much you know about Ross and Joey and Rachel, you know nothing more about Jennifer Anniston than I do. You've never spent any time with her and cannot speak to any of her attitudes on anything important in life. (If you do have a close relationship with her, then this post is probably useless to you anyway.
So given that we all know the same amount aout Anniston as a real human (nothing), and equal amounts about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt (again, nothing and nothing) why does everyone assume that Jolie and Pitt are bad guys and Anniston is the good guy in American culture? Perhaps even more importantly, why do there have to be good guys and bad guys in this situation and returing to the start of my post, why do we even care about the relationships of celebrities? Knowing nothing about any of these people also raises some more questions for me about American perceptions in general. It seems to me that the general consensus is that Jennifer didn't deserve to be left, that Jolie doesn't deserve Pitt and that Pitt (retrospectively, one can only assume) really didn't or doesn't deserve Anniston anyway. So my questions are #1 Why does Anniston deserve to be loved properly by a "gorgeous" man who deosn't deserve her? #2- Why doesn't Jolie deserve this? and #3- (the real point of this post) What is love (and can it show us the meaning of life)?
Obviously on the points of questions #1 and #2 I don't think either woman deserves love any more or any less than each other or any other woman in the world. It is obviously my feeling that the country has some sort of abnormal attachment to Anniston because she has been in their living rooms for a decade as a sweet, girl-next-door, and Jolie only came in in skinamax movies or in wierd news stories about Billy Bob Thornton. So America had picked sides in this issue before it even happened. However I have a different view on this because of question #3. To me love is a verb. Love is an action, and no one deserves love from anyone else, especially not for being in a TV Show. That is why love is so special when it happens. It is a free gift from the giver. One a person arrives at a point that he or she believes that the gift of love is an entitlement, then problems are going to arise. And if I may interject some observations to this discussions, my own eyes show me that Jolie goes around the world loving people and children and not requiring anything in return for it. She seems to want to use her celebrity to help others. I'm not saying that Anniston doesn't, but I know that Jolie does. So I don't buy that Jolie is a horrible human being and Anniston is perfect. More likely it didn't work out and Brad moved on and is that really such a shock? Perhaps there are issues that none of us know about (ie the hinted about aversion Anniston has to having children would be one example) that make Jolie a better choice for Pitt. Maybe Anniston wasn't providing Pitt with a reciproical relationship. Perhaps Jolie is actually the good guy in this relationship. Reguardless, does it really make any difference in your life? If Brad wasn't loving Jennifer (active verb) isn't she better off anyway? And can't he and Angelina at least try to be happy by creating a family? And how does any of this matter?
It matters because it exposes a truth about our culture and why a majority of people have chosen Jen over Ang: Anniston is "pretty" and Jolie is "sexy." Women in particular want men to want Anniston because her beauty is average. She stays fit, grooms herself, and looks relatively normal. Most women feel that if they applied themselves they would look something like Anniston. They therefore want Brad Pitt to have to stay with her because it means they might have had a chance with him if things had fallen differently for them and they ended up in Hollywood instead of Anniston. Jolie on the other hand is gorgeous. Just born that way. She is better looking than most people on the planet and that threatens people. "Why should she get to have Pitt?" they seem to be saying. It just seems unfair to them. So they hate her, disparage her, and berate Pitt for wanting to be with her. It removes all faux hope that Pitt could love or choose them in the right circumstances. At this point you are saying, "Methinks he doth protest too much. If you really don't care about celebrities, why are you writing so much about it?" The thing that I really care about in this situation is the underlying, unwritten attitude it seems to highlight in our culture.
The problem is that we have evolved into a selfish and lazy culture. We want the best looking guy to have to love us and be faithful to us. We don't care what his needs or wants are or if we are meeting them. We deserve the best looking guy to be faithful to us. We are not required to work to keep anything, it should exist only for us. My desire is to be someone who loves others, not to be an object of love. My desire is to give love and show love and not to require or demand love from anyone else. My desire is to actively love other people without expecting to gain anything in return. And if Jennifer Anniston really does need a true Friend, perhaps she should try to put into practice the wise words or the scholars who once wrote:

"So no one told you life was gonna be this way (clap clap clap clap)

Your job's a joke, you're broke, your love life's D.O.A.

It's like you're always stuck in second gear

When it hasn't been your day, your week, your month, or even your year

But I'll be there for you (when the rain starts to pour)

I'll be there for you (like I've been there before)

I'll be there for you (because you're there for me too) "