Angelina Jolie: Brad Pitt accepts 'all my flaws and all my oddities'

Now that Angelina Jolie has shed her wild-child image, the actress is loving her new life as a homebody.

"We're very homebound," Jolie says of her relationship with partner Brad Pitt in the July 11 issue of Parade magazine. "We're very much Mommy and Daddy in our pajamas."

"There's never a period when Brad and I are pulled apart," she continues. "We are not separated for more than three days, ever. We stay really connected."

But the 35-year-old actress admits that she and Pitt have to work at finding "that special time" together.

"He takes the kids to school; he visits me on set with the kids. I'm home for dinner, or I'm there for breakfast ... We plan," she says. "Brad and I take time off between films to travel, have big experiences, do things together. That's how we work it out."

Although Jolie says she is "terrible" at trying to define love, she knows she has found it with Pitt and her children.

"It means wanting the best for the people you love, putting their interests above your own, always," she says. "Love does that. Love is what you live for."

"Brad knows me completely, exactly as I am, every part of me. He loves me. The kids love me," she adds. "They know all my flaws and all my oddities. And they accept them. And so I can feel complete."

Something Jolie feels complete without: her kids growing up in the spotlight.

"We do everything we can to keep our kids away from it," she says. "We travel to places where the kids aren't aware of that kind of thing. We try to give them a full life where they don't have to come face to face with that world. With the paparazzi present, we're careful when we leave the house. Other than that ... We don't stand in the checkout line at the grocery store looking at the magazines. Our friends don't tell us about it. And our kids don't know."

Rather than a life of glitz and glamor, Jolie just hopes to give her kids a happy life. "If Brad and I are strong and happy, then our kids have happy parents, and that's the best thing we can give them."

Life may be looking good for Jolie now, but things haven't always been so rosy for the "Salt" star.

"I used to cut myself or jump out of airplanes, trying to find something new to push up against because sometimes everything else felt too easy. I was searching for something deeper, something more," she explains. "I tried everything. I always felt caged, closed in, like I was punching at things that weren't there. I always had too much energy for the room I was in."

"I went through a period when I felt my film characters were having more fun than I was," she continues. "It might partly explain why I ended up tattooed or doing certain extreme things in my life."

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