J.Lo Says Her Divorce Was ‘Exactly What I Needed’
Jennifer Lopez is loving her new life as a single woman following her split from Ben Affleck. Anyone who has been keeping up with her Instagram could’ve told you that, but now she’s coming right out and saying it. The singer sat down with Nikki Glaser for Interview magazine (fun pairing) and opened up about everything she’s learned about herself in the past year. It’s a lot, if you can believe it.
Lopez said that she was in a good place at the beginning of the year, right after she released This Is Me … Now and its cinematic companion piece. “I felt like, Whoa, I got here. I’m good,” she told Glaser, “I did all the work and look at where I am. Then it was like my whole fucking world exploded.”
“It’s a lifelong process,” Lopez said of her ongoing journey to self-discovery. “When your whole house blows up, you’re standing there in the rubble going, ‘How do I not ever let that happen again?’ Then you start examining it little by little saying, ‘Okay, I did this, this was my part in it, this was what I should have seen early on, this is what I didn’t look at.’ Those things are what really are the lessons.”
“You have to be complete, if you want something that’s more complete,” Lopez said to Glaser. “You have to be good on your own. I thought I learned that, but I didn’t. Then, this summer, I had to be like, ‘I need to go off and be on my own. I want to prove to myself that I can do that.’”
From my perspective, mission accomplished. You might recall that Lopez spent the warmer months having fun far away from Los Angeles, where Affleck was constantly being photographed going to and from his office. She spent time on a boat in Italy with her friends before decamping to the Hamptons for all of July. There, she ate ice cream, took photos, hung out with Violet Affleck at an antiques fair, and had a Bridgerton-themed birthday party.
Lopez said she had no regrets about her divorce or the pain that came with it. “That doesn’t mean it didn’t almost take me out for good. It almost did,” she said. “But now, on the other side of it, I think to myself, ‘Fuck, that is exactly what I needed.’”
As for jumping back into dating, that won’t be happening anytime soon. “I’m not looking for anybody, because everything that I’ve done over the past 25, 30 years, being in these different challenging situations, what can I fucking do when it’s just me flying on my own?,” she asked, “What if I’m just free?”
Someone get Elizabeth Gilbert on the phone. I would love to learn more about Lopez’s revelations from this period of her life, but I don’t know if I can handle another self-funded art project. A memoir, though. That’s something I think we could all get behind.
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