from Tom Leonard
Ben Affleck can’t curb J-Lo’s addiction to the spotlight. She can’t control his moods. Two years after their $400,000 wedding – and two decades after their original engagement – no wonder insiders believe...
TWO years ago, then thrice-married Jennifer Lopez insisted on wearing white when she wed Ben Affleck in a Las Vegas drive-through chapel, nearly two decades after they cancelled their first wedding.
‘Love is beautiful. Love is kind,’ a starry-eyed Jennifer, then 52, assured fans. ‘And it turns out love is patient. Twenty years patient.’
Yet love can also be fickle. This week, the singer and actress was pictured dressed all in white again — only this time she was out hunting for a new home in Beverly Hills, as rumours spread that she and Ben were heading for divorce.
Until Thursday when they arrived separately to watch Ben’s child, Fin, perform in a school play in Los Angeles, the celebrity couple known as ‘Bennifer’ haven’t been seen together since the end of March — when they were spotting having a tense-looking lunch in New York.
Affleck has reportedly now moved out of the sprawling £47 million mansion they bought only 11 months ago and is living in a house in Brentwood, the same Los Angeles neighbourhood where his ex-wife Jennifer Garner lives with their three children.
While both he and Lopez are still pointedly wearing their wedding rings, celebrity gossip magazine In Touch weekly reported this week that the actor-director had ‘hit a breaking point’ with Lopez.
‘The writing is on the wall — it’s over,’ said an insider. ‘They’re headed for a divorce — and for once [Ben’s] not to blame.’
On Thursday, Lopez fuelled the speculation by ‘liking’ an Instagram post about ‘broken relationships’ with no ‘integrity and respect’.
Other sources then subsequently admitted that the couple were having problems in their marriage but insisted they were not yet giving up on it. They are having marriage counselling but Affleck is reportedly sceptical as to whether it will work.
For the two egotistical stars, ‘everything is a fight’, observed someone who knows them, with the couple’s union seeming to be ‘held together by nothing but Scotch tape’.
‘They started having issues a few months ago as Jen had started ramping up work commitments and prepping for her tour,’ an insider told
Us weekly. ‘ Jen is very focused on work. They are on two completely different pages most of the time.’
If it really is curtains for Bennifer, millions of romantically inclined fans around the world will be devastated. After all, what’s more charming than the idea of a couple, pulled apart by circumstance, getting a second chance at love years later.
It had all looked so promising, with Affleck reportedly going down on one knee and proposing for a second time while Lopez was relaxing in a bubble bath. Their secret Las Vegas ceremony was followed in August 2022 by a three- day wedding celebration on Affleck’s estate in Georgia, costing an estimated $400,000.
LOPEZ had first revealed their relationship was back on in July 2021 when she posted online a picture of her kissing Affleck on her 52nd birthday (he’s three years her junior).
‘We’re older now, we’re smarter, we have more experience, we’re at different places in our lives, we have kids now, and we have to be very conscious of those things,’ she said a few months later, explaining why it would be different for the couple this time round.
‘It’s a beautiful outcome that this has happened in this way at this time in our lives where we can really appreciate and celebrate each other and respect each other.’
Noble sentiments, but they clash horribly with what unnamed ‘insiders’ have been saying this week.
‘He’s focusing on his work and his kids now,’ a source told In Touch. ‘Ben already moved out and they’ll likely have to sell the dream house they spent two years searching for. They’ll never stop loving each other, but she can’t control him, and he can’t change her. There’s no way it could have lasted.’
And why not? ‘ Jen’s need to make their relationship so public and perfect often leaves Ben feeling overwhelmed and henpecked,’ the apparently well-informed informant added. ‘He just needs to be by himself sometimes, out of her shadow.’
While representatives of Affleck and Lopez have not yet commented officially on the claims, others have pointed to various aspects of the marriage that suggested it was in trouble. The couple weren’t together last weekend when Mother’s Day was celebrated in the US and Lopez had to tread the red carpet alone at New York’s supremely glitzy Met Gala earlier this month where she was the event’s co-chair.
Affleck’s failure to accompany her to the Gala was certainly odd — for a fashionista like her it was one of the biggest nights of her life. Affleck’s people cited his filming commitments, but these hadn’t stopped him attending a party for American football star Tom Brady (without Lopez) the previous night.
An insider insisted Lopez wanted to give her husband ‘some breathing room’ and added: ‘of course she was a little hurt, but she knows he loves her. He just needed a break from the red carpets and publicity that she craves.’
Although some say it reflects his dislike of being snapped by paparazzi, Affleck has been looking so miserable for months that such pictures of him became an internet meme.
Whether he was opening the car door for his wife and then angrily slamming it or sitting beside her holding her hand at the Grammys in February, he has had a face like thunder.
In fact, Lopez became so sensitive about the mockery their photos were attracting that she tried to put the record straight in January.
‘You don’t need to worry about Ben,’ she said on the Golden Globes red carpet. ‘Let me just tell you, he is good. He is happy.’
At least, on that occasion he was with her — although that may have been because he’d been nominated for an award.
The couple’s PR minders have come up with various excuses for why they haven’t been seen together but the main source of In Touch’s report seems fairly adamant that the marriage is heading for rocks even bigger than the 8.5 carat green diamond engagement ring he gave her in 2022.
Which is all rather embarrassing given that in February, Lopez delivered a three-pronged, £16million public tribute to their enduring love — an album, film and documentary — that smacked to some of desperation. The album, entitled This Is Me... Now, features various tracks — and not just the one titled Dear Ben — that are clearly about him. She also selffinanced an accompanying musical film about the events that inspired the album, which featured cameo performances by both her and Affleck.
The film was billed as Lopez’s ‘unflinching’ 20-year ‘journey to selflove’ and a ‘vulnerable portrait of an icon who put it all on the line and discovered a newfound determination in self-acceptance and love’.
Its director, Dave Meyers, said Affleck — as buttoned-up about his private life as the self-absorbed Lopez is prone to over-sharing — initially felt some trepidation over having ‘all their personal stuff out there’ for the film.
But he added: ‘It’s [Jennifer’s] way to love. I think [Ben] saw that and supported it, and gave us good advice and tried to help connect the dots in getting it out there.’
AND then there was an Amazon documentary, The Greatest Love Story Never Told, in which Affleck actually admitted he confronted Lopez over her craving for the spotlight.
In it, he says: ‘Getting back together, I said: “Listen, one of the things I don’t want is a relationship on social media.” Then I sort of realised it’s not a fair thing to ask.
‘It’s sort of like you’re going to marry a boat captain and you go “well, I don’t want the water”. we’re trying to learn to compromise.’
Lopez explains further: ‘I don’t think he is very comfortable with me doing this but he doesn’t want to stop me.’
Left to himself, Affleck has been almost Trappist about their relationship. Interviewed by the wall Street Journal in December 2021, he refused point blank to discuss Lopez although he acknowledged he was lucky to have had second chances in both his career and private life.
Asked which of them reignited their relationship, he bafflingly replied: ‘I can say that it’s definitely beautiful to me.’
Will they have to accept that they’re fundamentally incompatible?
While Affleck ‘for once’ may not be to blame for the alleged break-up, he has a dismal record when it comes to nurturing romantic relationships.
Gwyneth Paltrow ended theirs in the late 1990s, scornfully observing that Affleck’s perfect woman would be ‘any sort of stripper at [strip club] Scores. Anyone that serves cold beer in a bikini’.
Lopez’s romantic history hardly inspires much confidence either. when
she first met Affleck after they were cast together in the terrible romcom Gigli in 2001, she was married. When Affleck showily took out full-page adverts in the film industry trade press to gush about Lopez’s talents after she was accused of being difficult on set, it was rumoured the pair were having an affair, despite Lopez having wed second husband, dancer Cris Judd, only that year.
Affleck later insisted their relationship didn’t start until her marriage to Judd was over, claiming — with no small irony — that marital infidelity ‘goes against the fundamental code I believe in and live by’.
In July 2002, they were seen kissing at a surprise 32nd birthday party for Lopez in a New York restaurant at which Affleck gave her a bracelet of yellow and white diamonds. Lopez filed for divorce from Judd the same month, citing irreconcilable differences. The marriage had lasted ten months, about the same length as her first to waiter and occasional actor Ojani Noa, in 1997.
Affleck proposed to her on a huge bed of rose petals in November 2002, the same month the video for Lopez’s hit single Jenny From The Block was released.
In it, Affleck kissed her bikiniclad bottom — a posterior rumoured at the time to be insured for £21million. Even after their relationship became official, there were issues. In July 2003, Affleck reportedly visited a lapdancing club in Vancouver. One stripper claimed she and Affleck cavorted with three other dancers after he picked them up in the club, although Affleck denied it.
Lopez also discovered that Affleck and close friend Matt Damon had visited a Berlin nightclub the same year, while the latter was filming 2004 thriller The Bourne Supremacy. They caroused until 4.30am before returning to Damon’s apartment with a number of girls.
She reportedly also had issues with his compulsive love of poker and gambling, and was furious after he lost £450,000 in a single night. Eventually, scorched — so it was said — by the intense glare of becoming Tinseltown’s hottest couple and media claims that Lopez was a demanding diva, they ‘postponed’ their original wedding with only four days’ notice and pronounced their split in January 2004.
After breaking up with Lopez, Affleck first appeared publicly with actress Jennifer Garner nine months later.
Rather tactlessly, Affleck claimed that he’d first fallen in love with Garner in 2002 — when he was with still with Lopez — while they were making the superhero film Daredevil together. They married in 2005 and he insisted he’d finally settled down and become the devoted family man.
His Hollywood bad-boy habits, however, were ingrained. Affleck, whose father was an alcoholic, claimed to have given up drinking in 1998, but three years later he checked himself into rehab for alcohol abuse.
His womanising has seen him linked with the model Emily Ratajkowski, actress Blake Lively and with the Garner/Affleck family nanny, Christine Ouzounian.
Although Affleck insisted he never cheated on Garner, she later confirmed the affair with Ouzounian had happened but insisted it wasn’t the reason they divorced in 2015. Instead, it’s been claimed that she tired of his gambling and he had secretly started drinking again.
She later said: ‘I always say, “When his sun shines on you, you feel it.” But when the sun is shining elsewhere, it’s cold. He can cast quite a shadow.’
In 2017, Affleck was accused by two women of inappropriate behaviour. He apologised to an actress, who said he’d ‘tweaked’ her breast years earlier during a television interview, admitting he’d ‘acted inappropriately’. His spokesman didn’t respond to claims by a make-up artist that he’d once groped her bottom.
In 2018, Garner turned up at his house with a Bible and a lawyer and took him to rehab. The following year, he suffered a ‘lapse in sobriety’ at a charity ball, staggering off drunk with a blonde to a casino where he bought £16,000 worth of poker chips. Affleck claims he has managed to stay sober since early 2020.
Meanwhile, Lopez married singer-songwriter Marc Anthony, someone she’d dated in 1999, just five months after breaking up with Affleck. They had two children together but separated in 2011.
In 2021, she and baseball star Alex Rodriguez called off a twoyear engagement having twice postponed their wedding.
Second chances in love may sound romantic but some will counsel that first instincts are often correct.
And it is worth noting that while Lopez has said that calling off her wedding to Affleck in 2003 was the ‘ biggest heartbreak of my life’, Affleck has said that the ‘biggest regret’ of his life was his 2018 divorce from Jennifer Garner.