Ben Affleck Revealed the Youthful Personality Trait Jennifer Lopez Kept ‘Against All Odds’
Almost 20 years after ending their engagement, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez rekindled their romance. The couple got back together in 2021 and married in 2022. Affleck said that when they reunited, he was struck by how much Lopez reminded him of the person she’d been in the early 2000s. He said that despite all she’d been through in their years apart, her heart remained unchanged.
Ben Affleck said Jennifer Lopez still reminded him of who she was in the early 2000s
After Affleck and Lopez’s first break up, they both went on to marry other people and have children. Their lives took diverging paths, but they retained a level of fondness for one another. When they reestablished consistent communication in 2021, they both realized that they wanted a relationship again.
“Obviously we weren’t trying to go out in public,” Lopez told Vogue in 2022. “But I never shied away from the fact that for me, I always felt like there was a real love there, a true love there. People in my life know that he was a very, very special person in my life. When we reconnected, those feelings for me were still very real.”
For Affleck, part of what drew him to Lopez was the ways in which she had gone unchanged.
“There is something innately, magically kind and good and full of love at the heart of who Jennifer is,” he said. “That’s exactly the person I remember from 20 years ago.”
He acknowledged that she had grown in many ways, but his favorite part of her was just as he remembered it.
“Maybe she sees all the changes she’s made, whereas when I see her, mostly I just see someone who has retained, against the odds, the thing about her that always made her the most incredible to me: a heart that seems boundless with love,” he said. “She is my idea of the kind of person I want to be.”
Jennifer Lopez said her relationship trajectory with Ben Affleck isn’t for everyone
Lopez and Affleck spoke glowingly about their renewed relationship, but she said their path wasn’t for everyone.
“I don’t know that I recommend this for everybody,” she said. “Sometimes you outgrow each other, or you just grow differently. The two of us, we lost each other and found each other. Not to discredit anything in between that happened, because all those things were real too. All we’ve ever wanted was to kind of come to a place of peace in our lives where we really felt that type of love that you feel when you’re very young and wonder if you can have that again.”
Why did Bennifer break up the first time?
In 2024, Affleck and Lopez are once again facing break-up rumors and media scrutiny. They both said that outer pressures were part of what led to their first split.
“Ben and I, we broke up three days before our wedding,” Lopez said in her documentary The Greatest Love Story Never Told. “We had a big wedding planned — 14 ushers and bridesmaids — and three days before, we just crumbled under the pressure.”
Affleck agreed, pointing to the “massive amount of scrutiny around our private life.”
