Jennifer Lopez On 2004 Ben Affleck Split: ‘I Felt LIke I Was Going To Die’
Jennifer Lopez said her breakup with Ben Affleck 20 years ago was so painful she thought she’d die. Per Yahoo! the singer talked about her upcoming Affleck-inspired album titled This Is Me…Now. She also discussed his reaction to her very personal lyrics. Lopez, 53, said, “Twenty years ago, I fell in love with the love of my life. 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.”
Affleck and Lopez tied the knot twice over the summer after rekindling their relationship. The couple initially called off their engagement in 2004. Lopez recalled, “It was so painful after we broke up. Once we called off that wedding 20 years ago, I was — 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. Couldn’t get it right. But now, 20 years later, it does have a happy ending. It has the most would-never-happen-in-Hollywood ending. ‘That would never happen. We’re not going to write that because nobody would believe it’ ending.”
Lopez said that when she and Affleck reunited, he called her out for not performing songs that were about him on her 2002 album, This Is Me…Then. “I was like, ‘You’re right. It was painful.’ It was a part of me then that I had to put away to move on and survive. It was a survival tactic, for sure,” Lopez recalled. “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. Every single song that we wrote there, me writing ‘Dear Ben,’ it was such a special moment in time to have captured.” Lopez revealed that Affleck even “knows all of the words” to songs on that album.
The Marry Me star said the “outside energy” of the media frenzy surrounding their relationship in the early 2000s “destroyed us,” adding, “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.’ And 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 kind of go into hyper-gear,” noting they had “to do it separately. He went into hyper-gear and I went into hyper-gear. But not together. We had to do it separately… It fueled us in a weird way that we felt we had to prove ourselves again.”
Lopez hinted that This Is Me…Now will feature similarly personal lyrics about Ben like This Is Me…Then did. “We captured me at this moment in time when I was reunited with the love of my life and we decided we were going to be together forever. The whole message of the album then is this love exists. This is a real love. Now, what I think what the message of the album is very much if you were wondering if you have, like me at times, lost hope, almost given up, don’t. Because true love does exist and some things do last forever and that’s real,” the “All I Have” singer said. “I want to put that message out into the world and that does take a lot of vulnerability. But I couldn’t stop myself and some parts of it scare me. And I think parts of it scare Ben, too. He’s like, ‘Oh, do you really want to say all this stuff?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know how else to do it, baby.”
This Is Me…Now will be released in 2023. Lopez revealed the tracklist on social media:
- This Is Me … Now
- To Be Yours
- Mad in Love
- Can’t Get Enough
- Rebound
- not. going. anywhere.
- Dear Ben pt. ll
- Hummingbird
- Hearts and Flowers
- Broken Like Me
- This Time Around
- Midnight Trip to Vegas
- Greatest Love Story Never Told
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