Celebrity

Jennifer Lopez Opens Up About Ben Affleck Split: ‘Like My Whole F***ing World Exploded’

Jennifer Lopez says she's learned she's 'capable of joy and happiness all by myself.'

by Megan Elliott

Published on October 9, 2024

3 min read

Jennifer Lopez felt she’d figured things out before Ben Affleck divorce

Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck | Robyn BECK / AFP

Lopez didn’t address the end of her marriage to Affleck directly in her conversation with Glaser. (She filed for divorce in August, two years after they tied the knot.) But she spoke candidly about her long journey to self-acceptance.

“You start slowly chipping away at different things – ‘This is not right and this is not right’ – and learning how to be on your own, and you start putting the pieces together and then you think, ‘Oh, I did it! I’ve got it!’” she said.

Earlier this year, Lopez released the album This Is Me … Now, along with an accompanying film inspired by her romance with Affleck. At the time, she thought it was the culmination of her journey to figuring herself out.

“With This Is Me … Now … I felt like, whoa, I got here. I’m good,” she said. “I did all the work and look at where I am, and then it was like my whole f***ing world exploded.”

Lopez says learning is a ‘lifelong process’

While Lopez wasn’t expecting her tumultuous year, she is embracing the changes that life is throwing at her.

“It’s a lifelong process. I think that’s what I love about life, that there’s no arrival point. There’s only getting better and growing if you want to … there’s times when I thought I figured it out, and then life goes, ‘Let’s send you another thing and see if you fall for it. Let’s see if you really have learned that lesson,’” she said. “And I hadn’t.”

“I understand that now in a much deeper way, which doesn’t mean that I won’t make mistakes in the future, but again, when your whole house blows up, you’re standing there in the rubble going, ‘How do I not ever let that happen again?’ And then you start examining it little by little saying, ‘OK, I did this, this was my part in it, this was what I should have seen early on, this is what I didn’t look at.’ Those things are what really are the lessons,” she added.

The ‘Selena’ star has realized she doesn’t need a relationship to be happy

For Lopez, one of the biggest takeaways from the end of her fourth marriage is that she doesn’t need to rely on other people to be happy.

“I am capable of joy and happiness all by myself,” she told Glaser. “Being in a relationship doesn’t define me. I can’t be looking for happiness in other people. I have to have happiness within myself. I used to say I’m a happy person, but was still looking for something for somebody else to fill, and it’s just like, ‘No, I’m actually good.’”

“I’m not looking for anybody,” Lopez said later. “…For people who are romantics and love being in relationships and want to grow old with somebody, we think, ‘I have to have that to be whole and happy.’ And you don’t.”