Jennifer Lopez is looking back on her past marriages and divorces with a new lens.
“Do you think you’ve truly been loved?” Lopez, 56, was asked by Howard Stern during a visit to SiriusXM’s Howard Stern Show on Wednesday, October 15. The singer candidly replied, “No,” after a brief pause.
“What I learned, it’s not that I’m not lovable — it’s that they’re not capable. … They don’t have it in them,” Lopez continued. “And they gave me what they had. They gave me all of it, every time. All the rings, all the things I could ever want. The houses, the rings, the marriage. All of it.”
Lopez said she realized she “didn’t love” herself, which caused a lot of her deeply rooted uneasy feelings about marriage. (The “On the Floor” singer finalized her divorce from Ben Affleck in January after less than three years of marriage.)
Jennifer Lopez is getting real about the not-so-finer moments in her love life. “Being thrown around and manhandled like that is not fun,” Lopez, 54, said in her new documentary, The Greatest Love Story Never Told, which drops on Prime Video Monday, February 26. “I mean, I was never in a relationship where I got […]
“When I got divorced this last time, it was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Lopez told Stern, 71. “Because it really made me journey into — I mean, I had a religious coach, I had a therapist, a couples therapist, an individual therapist, I had a coach to understand addiction. I had everything. I was like, ‘I’m gonna f***ing figure this s*** out if it kills me.’”
Eventually, Lopez realized the “core of the thing is you — it’s nobody else.” It’s a sentiment she’s shared before while promoting Kiss of the Spider Woman, a role that helped pull her out of a difficult time in her life.
“It was hard not to think about stuff, but it was, like, the best and the worst of times. Every moment on set … I was so happy. And then … back home, it was not great,” Lopez said during a September 28 appearance on CBS Sunday Morning. “But you get through it and, you know, honestly, I have to say, it was the best thing that ever happened to me because it changed me. It helped me grow in a way that I needed to grow … become more self-aware. I’m a different person now than I was last year.”
Jennifer Lopez Cindy Ord/Getty Images for SiriusXM
Lopez and Affleck, 53, remain on good terms, as he attended the premiere of Kiss of the Spider Woman in New York City on October 6. His production company, Artists Equity, produced the project, and he praised Lopez for being “incredible” in the film while speaking with E! News on the red carpet.
“She’s fabulous. And it’s an enormously difficult — it’s all these masters, so it’s not edited in such a way where you can make a little mistake here and there in the dance,” Affleck told the outlet. “It’s singing and dancing and acting and also trying to hold together these multiple tones in the movie. That’s just probably the maximum level of difficulty for a performer.”
Aside from her split from Affleck, the Kiss of the Spider Woman actress has been married and divorced three other times. She wed producer Ojani Noa in 1997, but they called it quits on their relationship just 11 months later. Lopez dated Sean “Diddy” Combs from 1999 to 2001 before tying the knot with dancer Cris Judd in 2001. Their divorce was finalized in 2003.
Jennifer Lopez is explaining why she’s a quintessential, hopeless romantic who can seemingly create a spark with anyone — on screen, that is. “I can fall in love with anybody,” the actress, 56, joked during the Wednesday, October 8, episode of Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang’s “Las Culturistas” podcast. “That’s the bad quote from here. […]
Lopez moved on with Marc Anthony, marrying the singer in 2004. Four years later, they welcomed twins Max and Emme. They split in 2011 and finalized their divorce in 2014. She looked back on their marriage with nothing but respect for Anthony, with whom she continues to coparent the children.
“When my marriage ended, it was not easy to find forgiveness,” Lopez told W Magazine in May 2016. “It wasn’t the dream that I had hoped for, and it would have been easier to fan the flames of resentment, disappointment and anger. But Marc is the father of my children, and that’s never going away. So I have to work to make things right. And that is, by far, the hardest work I do.”