Jennifer Lopez Didn’t Think She Gave Her 11-Month 1st Marriage a ‘Fair Shot’
In 1997, Jennifer Lopez celebrated her marriage to her first husband, Ojani Noa. The pair wed when both were in their early 20s, and their marriage didn’t make it a year. While Lopez has said she doesn’t necessarily count her first and second marriages, she didn’t think her relationship with Noa had a fair shot. She spoke about why their relationship ended.
Jennifer Lopez said her first marriage could have lasted
In Feb. 1997, Lopez and Noa married. In Jan. 1998, they ended their relationship. Lopez admitted that they may have rushed into marriage.
“It was nice — a love-at-first-sight situation,” she told Rolling Stone in 2001. “We got married. He was young, twenty-one, and I was twenty-five. It was premature, I guess. I don’t think we had a fair shot as far as where we both were in life.”
She said that they didn’t divorce because of a lack of love between them. Instead, she realized that more went into sustaining a marriage than romantic feelings.
“It wasn’t for a lack of love — that was genuine,” she said. “Sometimes things just don’t work out. But it did make me realize that love isn’t the only thing that makes a marriage work — it’s also about compromise, sacrifice and understanding.”
Jennifer Lopez admitted her career was a strain on her marriage
Shortly before Lopez and Noa divorced, she spoke about the strain her career was placing on their relationship. He struggled with the fact that she made more money than him.
“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.’”
She said he could have given up their lifestyle if given the opportunity.
“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.”
She has married three other times
After her divorce from Noa, Lopez dated Sean “Diddy” Combs. After they broke up, she married her second husband, Cris Judd, in 2001. Their marriage was similarly short-lived, with the couple divorcing in 2003.
Lopez’s longest marriage was to Marc Anthony, with whom she shares two children. They finalized their divorce after 10 years of marriage.
Most recently, Lopez married Ben Affleck. After two years together, the couple recently filed for divorce.
