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Jennifer Lopez has gotten married four times in her search for true love. But she wedded some potential suitors faster than others. When a critic questioned Lopez’s decision to marry one of her exes shortly after dating, the singer didn’t hold back with her response.

How Jennifer Lopez responded to the idea of marrying too quickly

Jennifer Lopez at the premiere of "This is Me... Now: A Love Story".
Jennifer Lopez | ROBYN BECK/ Getty Images

Lopez has been known to marry a few of her significant others not too long after dating them. She met her first husband, Ojani Noa, in 1996, and married him a year later. Similarly, Lopez also married her second husband Cris Judd in 2001. This was only a year after Lopez met the dancer on the set of her music video “Love Don’t Cost a Thing.”

But Lopez’s marriage to Anthony was a much quicker process than her previous two marriages. Lopez was already friends with Anthony for a long time, having met the singer in 1998. But she and Anthony didn’t start dating until 2004, not too long after Lopez broke up with Ben Affleck. The pair walked down the aisle in June of that same year.

At the time, Lopez was aware of all the rumors circulating her ill-fated relationships. Her failed marriages, and relationships with those she didn’t wed like Affleck and Diddy, caused some to question Lopez’s romance decisions. According to Irish Examiner, Lopez hit out on critics of her love life. Especially one critic who questioned Lopez’s decision to marry as soon as she did.

“Misrepresented, misjudged. I was on a TV show yesterday and I was telling them I’d like to set boundaries about my personal life and the interviewer said: ‘Well, what if I told you you got married too soon?’ I was like, ‘Well, you have no right to judge me, you don’t know what happened,’” she recalled. “People think they know the facts, but they don’t. Some of it’s totally made up and some of it’s based on truth and some of it’s a soap opera they’re creating.”

Lopez further asserted that she mostly relied on her instincts when deciding who and how to marry.

“I’m human and I make choices. I follow my heart, I make mistakes and I just keep doing. I’m a woman. Well, I’m a girl, and absolutely, I believe in love. It’s the only thing,” she said.

Jennifer Lopez knew very quickly her marriage with Marc Anthony was wrong

Lopez’s marriage to Anthony lasted the longest out of all her other relationships. The two stuck together until 2011, before finalizing their divorce in 2014. But in hindsight, Lopez had doubts about her newfound romance with Anthony much earlier.

“I hung in there for seven years,” Lopez once told W(via Us Weekly). “I knew very quickly that it wasn’t the right thing.”

But Lopez didn’t let the disappointment of her and Anthony’s divorce discourage her from finding her perfect match one day.

“When my marriage ended, it was not easy to find forgiveness. It wasn’t the dream that I had hoped for, and it would have been easier to fan the flames of resentment, disappointment and anger. But Marc is the father of my children, and that’s never going away. So I have to work to make things right. And that is, by far, the hardest work I do,” Lopez said.

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As far as Lopez might’ve been concerned, being with Anthony might’ve been the first time she experienced a true marriage. She didn’t consider her first two marriages with Noa and Judd on the same level of longevity.

“I’ve been married three times: once was nine months and once was 11 months, so I don’t really count those,” she said on her YouTube channel Jennifer Lopez.

“I was married to Marc for 10 years, with the kids. I was very young the first two times I tried to get married,” she added. “I’m saying ‘tried’ to get married.”