Ben Affleck is breaking his silence three months after his divorce from Jennifer Lopez was finalized.
Affleck, 52, got candid about his split from Lopez, 55, in the April issue of GQ. The new interview, which dropped on Tuesday, March 25, marks the first time he has openly discussed their split — and more specifically, what went wrong.
“There’s no scandal, no soap opera, no intrigue. The truth is, when you talk to somebody, ‘Hey, what happened?’ Well, there is no: ‘This is what happened,’” the Oscar winner explained. “It’s just a story about people trying to figure out their lives and relationships in ways that we all sort of normally do.”
“I guess there’s a tendency to look at breakups and want to identify root causes or something,” Affleck noted. “But honestly, like I said, the truth is much more quotidian than probably people would believe or would be interesting.”
The Accountant 2 star — who repeatedly praised Lopez in the interview and shared his utmost “respect” for her — purposely chose not to disclose the finer details about their split because they feel too “embarrassing” and “vulnerable.”
“There is no ‘So-and-so did this’ or ‘This was the big event,’” he elaborated. “It sounds more like a couple’s therapy session, which — you would tune out of someone else’s couple’s therapy after a while. For one thing, you start going, ‘Okay, clearly this person has got these issues. Clearly they have these issues.’ And the reason I don’t want to share that is just sort of embarrassing. It feels vulnerable.”
Affleck and Lopez famously dated — and got engaged — in the early 2000s, before ultimately calling off their wedding in 2004. After several high-profile divorces — two for Lopez (Criss Judd and Marc Anthony, respectively) and one for Affleck (Jennifer Garner) — the couple nicknamed “Bennifer” got back together in 2021, tying the knot in two different ceremonies in 2022. Two years later, Lopez filed for divorce. The pair’s divorce was finalized in January, with a judge declaring the former couple legally single in February.
As for the discourse that the pair split because of their different attitudes towards fame — with Lopez wanting to share more of her personal life in the spotlight, while Affleck was more reluctant to —the Good Will Hunting star made sure to set the record straight.
“My temperament is to be a little bit more reserved and private than hers. As happens in relationships, you don’t always have the same attitude towards these things,” Affleck explained when discussing his participation in Lopez’s 2024 documentary, The Greatest Love Story Never Told. “And so I thought, Oh, this is interesting because how do you reconcile that? Because exactly what you said is true. I love and support this person. I believe in them. They’re great. I want people to see that.”
As Affleck explained, “You don’t marry a ship captain and then say, ‘Well, I don’t like going out in the water.’ You’ve got to own what you knew going into any relationship. And I think it’s important to say that wasn’t the cause of some major fracture. It’s not like you can watch that documentary and go, ‘Oh, now I understand the issues that these two had.’”
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