Jennifer Lopez Admitted Her 1st Husband Had Major Issues With Her Career

Jennifer Lopez married her first husband, Ojani Noa, as her career was taking off. Their marriage was short-lived, with the couple filing for divorce after less than a year. While they were still together, Lopez admitted that there were some problems with their relationship. Though Noa enjoyed their lifestyle, he didn’t like that Lopez was the primary breadwinner. 

Jennifer Lopez said her first husband didn’t like that she made more money than him

Lopez said that her level of success wasn’t easy on her love life. Noa had difficulty accepting the attention she received both on and off the screen.

“It’s hard for me to find normal contemporaries and it’s hard for men to deal with,” she told Movieline in 1998. “The man I’ve married is Latin and they, more than any other type of man, are very macho. I always joke with him, because he’s like, ‘You can see through that dress!’ or ‘Is there going to be a love scene in that next movie? You’re my wife. I don’t want anybody to think of you in that way.’”

Lopez told Noa that the attention was necessary if he wanted to maintain his lifestyle. While he enjoyed her wealth, she thought he would give it up if it meant he could be the breadwinner.

“Ojani gets it, though,” she said. “But, I have to say, if you asked him right now, he’d rather have me home washing dishes, with us living in a small apartment, with him making the money rather than me making millions of dollars a year, living in a house that I mostly pay for. It’s tough for me to try and show him that even though I make a lot of money, I feel I still need him.”

Jennifer Lopez said she didn’t like seeing stories about her husband in the press

For Lopez, the biggest challenge to her relationship was the attention on it. Suddenly, she was seeing reports about her marriage in the press.

“Having your life judged in the press is a tough thing,” she said. “It was in the paper and all over the Spanish news reports that he was throwing things at me, that I was throwing him out, that he was asking me for money. I was like, ‘Where do these people get these stories from?’ My husband’s mother actually called from Cuba, where they don’t even get news all the time, saying, ‘What happened? Are you guys getting a divorce?’”

She said it didn’t help that she knew not many people would sympathize with her.

“Dealing with these things is tough, but nobody sympathizes with you,” she said. “And when I was on the other side, I didn’t sympathize either, because I’d be like, ‘What the hell is she complaining about with her Gucci shoes and her Dolce fur?'”

She said she doesn’t count her first two marriages

After divorcing Noa in 1998, Lopez went on to marry dancer Cris Judd in 2001. She once said that she barely counts these two marriages.

“I’ve been married three times,” she said in a YouTube video. “Once was nine months and once was 11 months. So I don’t really count those. I was married to Marc [Anthony] for 10 years with the kids. I was very young the first two times I tried to get married.”

Lopez’s fourth marriage to Ben Affleck recently ended.