Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck ‘crumbled under the pressure’ before calling off their 2003 wedding
Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck are revealing new information about what led them to call off their 2003 wedding.
In her new documentary, "The Greatest Love Story Never Told," on Amazon Prime, the couple recount how they "crumbled under the pressure" of the public eye.
"Ben and I, we broke up three days before our wedding," Lopez says in the documentary. "We had a big wedding planned – 14 ushers and bridesmaids, and three days before we just crumbled under the pressure."
Affleck adds in a separate interview, "When Jen and I broke up before, the catalyst for that was this massive amount of scrutiny around our private life."
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The couple met on the set of "Gigli" in 2002, got engaged, and planned to marry in 2003. They ended up postponing their wedding and eventually ended things in January 2004.
Lopez reveals the years that followed the breakup were hard.
"I didn’t just feel like I lost the love of my life, I feel like I lost like the best friend that I ever had. And I couldn’t talk for so many years, and that was the hardest part," she says.
She went on to marry singer Marc Anthony, and shares two children, twins Max and Emme, with him. They divorced in 2014. Following that relationship, she dated former New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez, before reuniting with Affleck in 2021.
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Affleck married Jennifer Garner in 2005, and shares three children with her; Violet, Seraphina and Samuel. They divorced in 2019, and he dated "SNL" producer Lindsay Shookus and actress Ana de Armas in the interim before he and Lopez rekindled their romance.
They married in a surprise Las Vegas ceremony in 2022, followed by a lavish traditional one at Affleck’s Georgia home shortly afterward.
Lopez examined her romantic life on her new album, "This is Me… Now" and the accompanying music film, "This is Me… Now: A Love Story."
The documentary follows the making of the movie, and Affleck notes that the event that kicks off the film is their breakup, portrayed as a dramatic motorcycle crash in the beginning.
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Acting as an interviewer at one point in the documentary, Affleck says, "When I first read the script, it looks like the inciting incident that causes all this pain down the road is our breakup. I felt wow, we didn’t do anything wrong, it was mutual, and I think for us to move on from that, we have to kind of forget it, forgive each other. You forgive me?"
Lopez doesn’t answer but smiles slightly and shakes her head a little.
Later, she says, "That heartbreak set both of us on a course to figuring ourselves out, to being better people."
In her recent Variety interview, Lopez further explained, "Our relationship crumbled under the weight of the pressure. We lost a sense of ourselves, and we needed to separate because we didn’t know how to survive it. I had to figure myself out, and he had to figure himself out."
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In the documentary, Affleck says, "I had a very firm sense of boundaries initially around the press, while Jen, I don’t think, objected to it the way I did. I very much did object to it. Getting back together, I said, ‘Listen, one of the things I don’t want is a relationship on social media.’ And then I realized it’s not a fair thing to ask. It’s sort of like, you’re going to marry a boat captain, you want to like the water. We’re just two people with kind of different approaches, trying to learn to compromise."
Toward the end of the documentary, they revisit the forgiveness question, and Affleck asks, "You think you’ve forgiven me all the way?"
Lopez replies, "Yeah, I think I’ve forgiven you all the way. I think I need to forgive myself some things."
"The Greatest Love Story Never Told" begins streaming on Amazon Prime today.