Jennifer Lopez said she had to ask herself some tough questions surrounding her split with ex-husband Ben Affleck.
Lopez appeared on the Smartless podcast on Monday, where she addressed the period surrounding her and Affleck’s split. The former couple reunited 20 years after their initial 2002 engagement in 2024 and married in July 2022. By May 2024, what seemed like a kismet boomerang love story turned sour, as rumors of trouble in paradise swirled.
Lopez seemed to confirm the trouble when she announced the cancellation of her summer tour, telling fans at the time, “I am completely heartsick and devastated about letting you down. Please know that I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t feel that it was absolutely necessary.”
On Monday, she revealed more about what was happening behind the scenes for her.
“After my last divorce, I just sat there, and I was like, I canceled my tour… I was just like, you need to f---ing figure yourself out,” she said. “What is going on with you? Forget about everybody else.”
Shortly after Lopez canceled the This Is Me…Now tour, reports emerged that Affleck had moved out of their marital home.
Lopez said she told herself at the time, “‘There’s nobody to blame here except yourself in a certain way.’”
“Not that people don’t behave in a way that’s not great, but what are you doing? What do you have going on? And that was a turning point for me,” she explained. “Part of being human is… We get these parents; they do the best they can, or they do as much as they can. They form certain parts about ourselves, and then our journey is kind of the undoing and the healing of those things, of the patterns that created.”
She did some inner work on herself rather than lay the blame on her former partner, she said. “I was able to kind of like go back to that little girl” inside and “really look at her, and go… ’You did this. You did all this. Give yourself a little f---ing something, like a little love. Stop looking for love in other things and give it to yourself.’”
Lopez was candid with Jimmy Kimmel in an appearance on his late-night show earlier this month, telling the host that her divorce was a great decision. “I should have done it sooner!” she said at the time. The star has fully embraced being single, she told Kimmel.
She seemed to drive her point home when, while promoting her latest romantic comedy, Office Romance, Lopez told her co-star, Brett Goldstein, that she “would have had sex with any one” of the cast members of 1993’s True Romance.
“That is the truth, which says a lot about me, but maybe like the dark side of me. But all of them were so incredibly f---ing good in this movie,” she added, referring to the film’s stars, which include Christian Slater, Val Kilmer, Patricia Arquette, Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken, Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini, and Gary Oldman.
“Their performances were so top-notch and so believable and so dynamic… I was just like, yeah, anybody. I’m down,” she concluded.
