J Lo’s big public mistake in marriage to Ben Affleck

Speaking to news.com.au in January, J Lo was eager to tell the world she’d found true, lasting love. That may have been the problem.

As I joined a Zoom call in January with a handful of other international journalists, all waiting for one of the world’s most famous women to join us and discuss her new project, I suddenly realised one thing: We hadn’t been told to steer clear of any personal topics.

Increasingly nowadays, many big celebrity interviews come with a list of caveats: Don’t ask about this. Don’t even dream of bringing up that. Ask about their personal life? Interview over.

But telling a group of nosy reporters to stay out of her personal life would be tricky for Jennifer Lopez, given she was joining us online to talk up her new multimedia project, This Is Me … Now.

The album, andaccompanying musical movie, and accompanying feature-length documentary about the making of said album and movie, all used her rekindled relationship with Ben Affleck as inspiration.

Ben and J Lo hit the red carpet in February for her movie based on their rekindled relationship. Picture: AFP

Twenty-two years earlier, J Lo had released a warm, soulful album called This Is Me … Then, full of gooey love songs dedicated to her then-fiance Ben Affleck (including one called, quite literally, Dear Ben) that sold more than six million copies worldwide.

They split before their wedding in 2003, unable to withstand the intense public interest in their relationship, and went their separate ways: Marriages, babies, divorces. Somehow, 20 years on, they’d found their way back to each other, both older and wiser.

In what seemed a counterintuitive move to many, given the relationship had already burned up once under the glare of tabloid intrusion, Lopez decided this was the time to share her marriage with the world, to shout about her love from the rooftops.

The album This Is Me … Now came two days after Valentine’s Day this year, and arrived sounding trapped in amber from the early noughties: If J Lo was aiming for retro with its tasteful R&B grooves, she instead sounded dated.

The album of gooey love songs dedicated to Ben Affleck (including one called, quite literally, Dear Ben Pt. 2) barely scraped the US top 40. Here in Australia, it charted at number 82.

2002’s This Is Me...Then.

This year came the sequel, This Is Me...Now.

But the album was just one aspect of a three-pronged attack on the senses that was This Is Me … Now: A week later, a 65-minute accompanying musical film debuted on Amazon Prime, featuring J Lo as a nameless “love addict” figuring out how to break out of a pattern of bad relationships and learn to be happy within herself.

Lopez had great faith in the project, funding it herself to a cost of around $US20m. Affleck had a cameo role, hidden under prosthetics, but fans looking for juicy details about their relationship were instead met with a dizzying and at times incomprehensible film that was equal parts Sex and the City, Bollywood musical and CGI-heavy Marvel movie.

J Lo gave the public much more insight into her relationship in an accompanying feature-length documentary, The Greatest Love Story Never Told, released at the end of February.

The musical film This Is Me... Now was a big budget, CGI-heavy affair.

By this point, it was clear the public were not matching J Lo’s enthusiasm for this project, but those who did watch the doco will have seen Lopez pushing herself to dig deep and mine her personal life to create This Is Me … Now, despite occasional protests from those around her.

“I want you to know that I don’t entirely know why, but I feel invested in you and Ben, and I really want this to work,” friend and former co-star Jane Fonda is heard telling her at one point, as she umms and ahhs about J Lo’s request to appear in the musical.

“However, this is absurd. It feels too much like you’re trying to prove something instead of just living it. You know, every other photograph is the two of you kissing and the two of you hugging.”

Lopez laughed off those concerns, but another telling moment in the documentary comes via the scene that inspired its title: Lopez reveals that Affleck collected all the notes and love letters they’d sent each other over the years, and had them bound in a book he’d gifted her titled ‘The Greatest Love Story Never Told’.

J Lo is shown dealing with pushback from Affleck in the behind-the-scenes documentary The Greatest Love Story Never Told.

In the film, Lopez presents the book to her creative team, encouraging them all to paw through to find inspiration for her musical.

Affleck looks absolutely aghast when he learns that their private love letters now anything but.

As he tells the cameras: “[There’s an] irony in the fact that it’s the greatest love story never told, and if you’re making a record about it, that seems kind of like telling it.”

Elsewhere in the documentary, Affleck expressed his reservations about re-entering Lopez’s orbit and what that would entail for an actor who tried to live his life more privately.

But the night before Valentine’s Day, he was there by her side at the LA premiere of her musical, kissing for the cameras (albeit less than convincingly):

Ben and J Lo share a kiss on February 13. Picture: AFP

One detail in J Lo’s divorce filing, made public today, reveals just how soon after the This Is Me … Now media onslaught it all fell apart for the couple: She listed their date of separation as April 26, 2024.

Back on that mid-January Zoom to spruik This Is Me … Now, Lopez was full of excitement about the project, ready to share what she considered her best and most personal work to date with her fans.

“People have been on this journey with me my whole life: ‘Is she really going to find love? What’s going to happen with her?’ And I had a lot of questions: ‘Does true love exist? Does anything last forever?’” she told us.

“Once I felt like I had answers, I wanted to share it.”