The love story of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck has a happy ending, but it is fraught with ups and downs, including Lopez admitting to Variety that they “both have PTSD” from the first iteration of their relationship in the early aughts.
(You know this, but) Lopez and Affleck first fell in love in 2002 after meeting on the set of the film Gigli in 2001; by the end of 2002, they were engaged (this time with Affleck presenting Lopez with a 6.1-carat pink diamond ring) and were planning a September 2003 wedding that was ultimately canceled days before it was set to happen. They remained together until January 2004, when they ended their engagement—and their relationship. Lopez went on to marry Marc Anthony five months later (they share twins Emme and Max); Affleck married Jennifer Garner in 2005, with whom he has three children, Violet, Seraphina, and Samuel. Both marriages eventually ended. But then: in 2021, the two reconnected, eventually making their second red carpet debut as a couple (the first was nearly 20 years prior) that September. In April 2022, Affleck proposed for a second time, this time with a ring featuring a green stone; they married in Las Vegas that July and, the next month, at Affleck’s home in Georgia. Whew.
After telling the outlet that both she and Affleck have PTSD from their first go ‘round (likely because of the media insanity—no exaggeration—over the phenomenon that can summed up in one word: Bennifer), she continued that “we’re older now. We’re wiser. We also know what’s important, what’s really important in life, and it’s not so much what other people think. It’s about being true to who you are.”
This PTSD and the rollercoaster ride of Lopez and Affleck’s love story will be explored in her forthcoming This Is Me…Now film, a project designed to accompany her first album released in nearly 10 years, E! News reports. Lopez’s “publicly scrutinized love life” is one of the focal points of the joint works, a follow up to her 2002 album This Is Me…Then. (Expect a “Dear Ben Part II,” for example.)
“You have to see it and you’ll have to experience it to understand it,” Lopez said. “That’s why I call it a ‘musical experience.’ Because there’s music, you can see it, you can hear it, and then you’ll get to live it.”
Some were against Lopez doing this project, but “As artists, we have to follow our heart, and this is me following my heart and doing something that maybe everybody didn’t think was the best idea, but I had to do it,” she said.
Affleck worked with Lopez on the project, and Lopez said that she and her husband would be open to working together onscreen again (in addition to Gigli, the two costarred in the film Jersey Girl in the early aughts). “We love being together and working together,” she said. “So, yeah, you never know.”
In January, Lopez told Jimmy Kimmel on his talk show that Affleck and their reconciliation sparked creativity within her: “I got very inspired when we got back together,” she said. “It was kind of like a miracle and something that neither one of us really ever thought would happen.”
This Is Me…Now drops February 16.
