After a relationship that spanned two decades, two engagements, two weddings and headlines too numerous to count, Jennifer Lopez has filed for divorce from Ben Affleck.
The filing Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court brought to an apparent end a celebrity coupling – or at least the second instalment of it – that dazzled from the very heights of the pop culture firmament and emblazoned countless tabloid covers. They became known, even before such power-couple portmanteaus were ubiquitous, as “Bennifer”.
The filing was first reported by the TMZ website. TMZ said Lopez listed the date of separation as April 26, 2024. It added that she did not mention any prenuptial agreement.
After meeting, falling in love and getting engaged in the early 2000s – and starring together in 2003’s infamous Gigli and 2004’s Jersey Girl – the couple parted ways, blaming in part the pressure of the public eye.
But to the delight of many and perhaps the scepticism of others, they reunited two decades later and married – twice – in 2022.
“Love is beautiful. Love is kind. And it turns out love is patient. Twenty years patient,” wrote Lopez, announcing their first, quickie Las Vegas wedding that July, and signing off as Jennifer Lynn Affleck.
“Stick around long enough and maybe you’ll find the best moment of your life in a drive through in Las Vegas at 12.30 in the morning in the tunnel of love drive through with your kids and the one you’ll spend forever with,” she wrote in her newsletter.
The couple had flown to Las Vegas, stood in line for their licence with four other couples and were wed just after midnight at A Little White Wedding Chapel, where Lopez said a Bluetooth speaker played their brief march down the aisle. She called it the best night of the couple’s lives.
A month later, they had a much grander wedding at Affleck’s house in Georgia, in front of friends and family.
Both of them had been previously married. Affleck, 51, married Jennifer Garner, with whom he shares three children, in 2005. They divorced in 2018.
Lopez, 54, had been married three times before. She was briefly married to Ojani Noa from 1997-1998 and to Cris Judd from 2001-2003. She and singer Marc Anthony were married for a decade, having wed in 2004, and share 14-year-old twins. She started dating former baseball player Alex Rodriguez in 2017, but the couple called off their engagement in 2021.
All along, it had been Lopez who was more vocal in describing her and Affleck’s journey. When asked earlier this year whether she was harder on herself because her relationships had been so high-profile, Lopez agreed.
“Oh yeah. 100 per cent. It’s made me doubt myself and really feel bad about myself at times. Made me feel like I wanted to quit at times. But at the end of the day, I feel like you kind of have to do this thing where you learn how to navigate it,” she told Associated Press.
“You take the things that could be constructive about that and use it, and the rest you kind of just throw away as kind of like haterations or, you know, other things like that and just be like, ‘Whatever. I know who I am, I know what I want to do.’ ”
Affleck himself expressed admiration for her self-possession, saying last year that he agreed with the observation that Hollywood was unsure how to capitalise on her wide-ranging talent.
“I think she’s in her prime,” Affleck said then. “She’s doing extraordinary work in large measure because she’s taking that step to take responsibility for what she’s doing rather than say, ‘This is what I’m being offered.’ ”
Lopez is starring in the coming Unstoppable, under Affleck and Matt Damon’s Artists Equity banner.
In May, she starred in the Netflix movie Atlas. At the end of the month, she suddenly cancelled her 2024 North American tour, saying she was “heartsick and devastated” to be letting fans down but the move was necessary. “Jennifer is taking time off to be with her children, family and close friends,” organisers said in a statement.
The tour was to be her first in five years, in support of her first solo album in a decade, This Is Me … Now and its companion film, a fictionalised look at her long love life, and a documentary.
“When I was a girl they’d ask me what I’d be. A woman in love is what I grew up wantin’ to be,” Lopez sang on the title track.
The album, she said, was inspired by her rekindled relationship with Affleck. But the film was more “about your journey as a person, it’s about one person’s journey and what it takes to get from heartbreak back to love. Or a hopeless romantic’s journey in their search for love.”
In the movie, she played a character called The Artist who, similarly, had decided as a child what she wanted to be when she grew up: “in love”.
But the road was rocky. In an early scene, The Artist is on the back of a motorcycle, riding across a beach, with a hunky man, face shielded. Then the motorcycle crashes.
“Not all love stories have a happy ending,” she says.
