Ben Affleck is finally ready to talk about what went wrong in his second grand romance with Jennifer Lopez. Two decades after they first dated in the early 2000s, the actors rekindled their spark in 2021. But sadly, the revived relationship ended similarly. Though they did make it down the aisle this time, saying “I do” in 2022, the couple filed for divorce in the fall of 2024. Affleck hasn’t spoken about the split since then, but now he’s hinting at the cause of the breakup.
Prior to the dissolution of their marriage, Lopez released a cinematic ode to her and Affleck’s love in the bold musical film This Is Me… Now. Affleck had a small role in the movie, but was much more present in its companion documentary, The Greatest Love Story Ever Told. It was in this doc that viewers started to pick up on what may have been an underlying issue for the couple: their very different approaches to fame.
“I think the thing that I said in that documentary or the piece that they used was where I said, ‘You don’t marry a ship captain and then say, “Well, I don’t like going out in the water,’” Affleck said in a March 25 GQ profile. “There are a lot of people who I think have handled celebrity more adeptly and more adroitly than I have, Jennifer among them. My temperament is to be a little bit more reserved and private than hers.”
While Affleck said their dissimilar ways of handling public attention wasn’t necessarily “the cause of some major fracture,” it was a bit of incompatibility he wanted to highlight in that doc. “As happens in relationships, you don’t always have the same attitude towards these things,” Affleck said. “You’ve got to own what you knew going into any relationship. … And so I thought, ‘Oh, this is interesting because how do you reconcile that?’”
Affleck went on to state that the true reason for the divorce really isn’t as sensational as the public might imagine. “There’s no scandal, no soap opera, no intrigue,” Affleck said. “The truth is much more quotidian than probably people would believe or would be interesting.”
Though Affleck and Lopez did deal with the constant fascination around their romance differently, he said that wasn’t really at the core of their split. “I get wanting to divine or explore the kind of differences in perspective that we have in terms of how a person feels comfortable approaching the line between public and private life,” Affleck said. “But I [don’t] have any negativity or judgment or anything regarding that. I have nothing but respect. I guess there’s a tendency to look at breakups and want to identify root causes or something.”
“The truth is, when you talk to somebody, ‘Hey, what happened?’ Well, there is no: ‘This is what happened.’ It’s just a story about people trying to figure out their lives and relationships in ways that we all sort of normally do,” Affleck continued. “There is no ‘So-and-so did this’ or ‘This was the big event.’ It’s really, it sounds more like a couple’s therapy session.”
