When Jennifer Lopez Thought She’d Die After Splitting From Ben Affleck: “It Was So Painful”

Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck are going through an alleged period of separation in their marriage, the couple first met in 2002 on the set of their movie Gigli. They got engaged the same year but eventually broke up in 2004. As per Glamour , Lopez in an interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music in 2022 confessed that it was the most difficult period in her life. The On the Floor songstress appeared on the show while promoting her album , This Is Me…Now , which was a follow-up to the 2002 Affleck–inspired album titled This Is Me…Then. “It was so painful after we broke up. Once we called off that wedding 20 years ago, it was the biggest heartbreak of my life. I honestly felt like I was going to die. It sent me on a spiral for the next 18 years where I just couldn’t get it right,” Lopez recalled.

She began by saying, “Twenty years ago I fell in love with the love of my life. I was working on an album and it was called This Is Me…Then. It was all about capturing that moment in time. Now the most amazing, incredible, unbelievable thing has happened. The reason we’re here is because I want to capture this moment in time because it is even better than the first time.” Lopez continued, “That album, This Is Me…Then really captured a moment in time where I fell in love with the love of my life. It’s all right there on the record. I didn’t even realize what was happening and what I was doing. It was just every day going from the set to the recording studio, doing the thing, being in love, him coming into the studio, writing ‘I’m Glad’ and going, ‘This reminds me of….’ You know what I mean? Me tweaking the lyrics with him. Every single song that we wrote there, me writing ‘Dear Ben,’ it was such a special moment in time to have captured.”

Recalling how they fell in love Lopez confessed, “I think what happened is, as we worked together [on the movie Gigli], we became such good friends. We realized that we were crazy about each other. I found myself kind of thinking about him after the movie was over. And having to take care of my own business, because I was coming out of a relationship at that time. But it’s like you just knew it. It’s just like, “This is the person I want to be with.” And that happened over a period of months. It wasn’t an instant thing because we weren’t allowed to do that. Yeah, it kind of grew over time.”

“It was a new thing and it destroyed us. That was part of what destroyed us was the outside energy that was coming at us. And we loved each other. It was hard. It felt, at times, unfair, but neither one of us is that person to be like, ‘Woe is me.’ So we were like, well, ‘We just got to dust it off and keep it moving.’ I think, in the weirdest way, that it motivated both of us to then become and do the things that we wound up doing, which is going into hyper-gear. He went into hyper-gear and I went into hyper-gear. But not together. We had to do it separately,” she said about their relationship undergoing media scrutiny.

Talking about their present relationship she said, “I think now that we’re older, we realize, it’s much more clear, because even in Then when we felt that way, now we know. Now, we know. And there is no questions and there is no kind of like, ‘Well, let’s see how this goes.’ Like, ‘Nope, it’s me and you. That’s it. All the way, till the end. That’s it. It’s going to be us.” She concluded, “We did know each other forever, and we had to live these separate paths and we did other beautiful things and we had these amazing children. But when we came back together and the universe and God and, as it would have it.”