Ben Affleck Calls Jennifer Garner Divorce ‘The Biggest Regret Of My Life’ In New Interview
Ben Affleck was emotional and vulnerable in his latest profile with the New York Times, where he confessed ‘I have certainly done things that I regret,’ including his divorce from Jennifer Garner.
Ben Affleck is coming to terms with his past and the mistakes he has made. The actor, 47, accounted for a lot of the shame he felt in his life, and how he is trying to move through it in a revealing New York Times interview, published on Feb. 18. “I drank relatively normally for a long time,” Ben revealed of his past substance abuse struggles. “What happened was that I started drinking more and more when my marriage was falling apart. This was 2015, 2016. My drinking, of course, created more marital problems.” Those problems subsequently led to Ben’s divorce from his wife of roughly 13 years, Jennifer Garner, 47, in 2018.
Jen and Ben — who share children Violet, 14, Seraphina, 11, and Samuel, 7 — were once considered one of Hollywood’s golden couples, after they met and fell for one another on the set of Daredevil (2003). But as Ben began to feel more ashamed of his behavior, his relationship became collateral damage. “The biggest regret of my life is this divorce,” he shared in the profile. Ben’s failed marriage rapidly plunged him into a state of shame. As he explained, “Shame is really toxic. There is no positive byproduct of shame. It’s just stewing in a toxic, hideous feeling of low self-worth and self-loathing.”
Now, however, Ben is trying to rebuild himself and come back from the mistakes that he made. “It’s not particularly healthy for me to obsess over the failures — the relapses — and beat myself up,” he shared of his personal struggles. “I have certainly made mistakes. I have certainly done things that I regret. But you’ve got to pick yourself up, learn from it, learn some more, try to move forward.”
In the profile, Ben credited stars like Bradley Cooper and Robert Downey Jr. for bringing him out of the dark places in his life. And it appears, over time, that Ben has been actively putting in the effort to turn his life around. He is regularly photographed co-parenting with his former wife, and doting on his kids for outings to the movies, church, and even holiday festivities. If the profile tells Ben’s longtime fans anything, it is that he is actively working to begin this new chapter of his life in a healthy frame of mind.