Jennifer Lopez, 53, talked a lot about her husband Ben Affleck, 50, in a new interview, including how she felt after they ended their engagement in 2004. “It was so painful after we broke up. Once we called off that wedding 20 years ago, it was the biggest heartbreak of my life,” J.Lo told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I honestly felt like I was going to die. It sent me on a spiral for the next 18 years where I just couldn’t get it right. But now, 20 years later, it does have a happy ending. It has the most would-never-happen-in-Hollywood ending,” she added.
J.Lo and Ben got back together in 2021, nearly two decades after their original split, and they officially got married in July. The singer’s 2023 album This Is Me… Now is a follow-up to her 2002 album This Is Me… Then, which featured her original love songs about Ben. Reflecting on the couple’s original split, J.Lo explained how tabloid culture “destroyed” her relationship with the Oscar winner.
“We loved each other. It was hard. It felt, at times, unfair, but neither one of us is that person to be like, woe is me,” the “Let’s Get Loud” singer shared. “So we were like, well, we just got to dust it off and keep it moving. I think, in the weirdest way, that it motivated both of us to then become and do the things that we wound up doing, which is going into hyper-gear. He went into hyper-gear and I went into hyper-gear. But not together. We had to do it separately.”
J.Lo revealed that she struggled with writing music until she got back together with Ben last year. “When he came back into my life, again the same thing happened where I felt so inspired and so overtaken with emotion that [the music] was just pouring out of me,” she told Zane. The Hustlers star also said that Ben still loves This Is Me…Then. “He loves that music. He knows all of the words,” she said. “It’s crazy. He also was with me while I was creating it.”
This Is Me…Now will feature the song “Dear Ben pt. ll”, as well as “Midnight Trip to Vegas,” after their July 2022 nuptials in Sin City. J.Lo said in the Apple Music interview that she wants her album to show everyone that “true love does exist” in life.
“I want to put that message out to the world. That does take a lot of vulnerability, but I couldn’t stop myself,” she said. “Parts of it scare me and I think parts of it scare Ben too. He’s like, ‘Do you really want to say all this stuff?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know how else to do it, baby.’ “