How Marie Claire UK cover star, Jennifer Garner, proves she was the phoenix all along

Jennifer Garner recently sat down with Marie Claire UK and did something she doesn’t really do – talk about her 2015 separation from Ben Affleck, which ultimately led to their divorce in 2018. Since their split, Jen has remained pretty tight-lipped about the nature of it all, save for that interview she did with Vanity Fair in 2016, but we’ll get back to that in a moment. For now, it’s safe to say her marriage, her divorce, and even their coparenting has remained their business, as much as is possible when you’re as famous as they are.

Jen chose to show, rather than tell, what raising kids together despite not being together can look like. They’ve each made a concerted effort to put their differences aside and show up for the three children they share, despite whatever hoopla may have been happening behind the scenes. And there was definitely hoopla happening behind the scenes. In her Marie Claire UK interview, she reflected on the fallout of her separation, getting candid about how she maintained her sanity during the very public collapse of her marriage and family life. She admitted that navigating the publicity of it all was challenging, but not nearly as challenging as the very real impact it had on her, her children, and at the time, her future.

“You have to be smart about what you can and can’t handle, and I could not handle what was out there. But what was out there was not what was hard. The fact of it is what was hard. The actual breaking up of a family is what was hard. Losing a true partnership and friendship is what was hard.”

And while those sentiments were insightful and real, it was her remarks on time that paint the true picture, the full scope and the reality of her evolution from where she was a decade ago, which would place her as the subject of that Vanity Fair article I said we’d get back to.

In 2016, Jen gave us all a master class in shade – and if you need a refresher or play-by-play, you can re-read Lainey’s critical analysis here. I’ve yet to see one of the Housewives do it quite like she did in this interview, with each word carefully chosen and loaded with veiled deep jabs and implications.

She touched on a lot in that Vanity Fair interview – from her crushed dreams about dancing at their children’s future weddings to perhaps the most famous snippet to have come out of that interview: the fact that she is not the ashes in their divorce, referring to the now gossip legend tattoo of a phoenix he has covering his entire back.

Part of what made her VF interview so satisfying and so relatable was the fact that it touched on an experience almost every straight, divorced woman I know has had. They married a man who conflated his own marital exhaustion or inability to fulfill his responsibilities as a husband and her being intolerable. When women function as wives in marriages and have mundane expectations of basic things like faithfulness, family time, and like, gee, maybe a clean house, it can push the very men who asked them to be wives in the first place away. They then go on to say things like they were ‘trapped’, like Ben did, despite him walking back those remarks later. Sometimes, men will say that she ‘nagged’ or, my personal favourite, that she ‘let herself go’ after carrying and birthing the children that call them Dad.

But in that interview, she wasn’t having any of it. She stood up for herself, essentially saying she did what she needed to do in their marriage. And as Lainey wrote, Jen was setting the record straight on the fact that she was not going to sit idly by while he implied, in any way, that he suffered in their marriage. And all these years later, it’s clear as day that she was right. Because Ben has still suffered, even after Jen. She is not the common denominator in his suffering.

She went on to describe some of the things about what came of her life that have surprised her and she had this to say:

“That I’m able to coparent at this point in time with peace and equanimity and a partnership that I didn’t know I would ever get back to. I think it’s important for women to know, when they think, ‘Oh, I’ll never see that, I’ll never have that feeling, I’ll never be friends with this person again’ that time is the opportunity. Time is the opportunity to heal. Time is the opportunity to forgive, to move on and to find a new way to be friends.”

As someone who is coparenting, too, albeit with a lot more difficulty than Jen has ever let on experiencing, her remarks are simultaneously insular, yet incredibly true. It may be contradictory to say, but that’s totally how it comes across, to me anyway. Reading that part of the interview I winced and grimaced, all while feeling an overwhelming sense of agreement. I think the problem with what she’s saying is what it always is with celebrities doling out advice – it’s not the message, it’s the messenger. They’re both filthy rich. And they have had the luxury of time. They are an entire decade into this process that so many people are only beginning. Or, they have fared better in that decade than some people have since their split. Their wealth protects them from the additional stresses that come from family court, paying for expensive lawyers, trying to work out who has the kids on what holidays and what school to send them to, all while carrying the heavy weight of guilt over not being able to be the nuclear family you intended – and in their case, vowed – to be.

But she’s right. Time is an opportunity. And even if friendship is not a realistic option for people who are coparenting, forgiveness is, because that’s an inside job. And I think Jen’s ability to forgive is what has made the last ten years of her life become what it has. Her refusal to sit and wallow in the anger and resentment that is natural after a divorce and her choice instead to throw herself into working with Save the Children, cofounding Once Upon a Farm, which she’s made available for lower-income families using WIC and SNAP – all of that has helped her build a truly enriching life.

As I’ve written before, women tend to fare much better than men after divorce because of their willingness to lean on their community, and because of their practice maintaining the family’s social calendar, which gives them the skillset of managing their own social calendars. And she detailed her deliberate attempts to be in community with her ‘people’, as she calls them, saying:

“I make a big, concerted effort to see my people as much as I can, because that’s what matters….That’s where your resilience is: it’s in your relationships and in the people who carry you through.”

So when it was time for shade, Jennifer Garner did that. When it was time to support the ex that broke her heart, she did that. And when it was time to rebuild her life after three kids and the end of a marriage she hoped would last forever, she did that. We knew this already but we can say it again, she is the phoenix.