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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, whose romance spanned two decades, two engagements, two marriages and countless headlines, have filed for divorce in divorce court.
The filing Tuesday in Los Angeles appears to bring an end to a celebrity couple — or at least a second one — that has graced the pop culture landscape and countless tabloid covers. Long before the power couple came along, the couple was known as “Bennifer.”
Court records show Lopez filed the complaint in Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday. TMZ first reported the news. TMZ further reported that Lopez listed the separation date as April 26, 2024. It added that she did not mention any prenuptial agreement.
The couple met, fell in love, got engaged in the early 2000s and co-starred in the infamous films “Sandwich Man” and “Jersey Girl” in 2003 and 2004, but eventually parted ways, partly due to public pressure.
But to the delight of many, and perhaps the suspicion of others, they reunited 20 years later and in 2022 got married — twice.
“Love is beautiful. Love is kind. And love is patient. Twenty years of patience,” Lopez wrote, announcing their first quickie Las Vegas wedding in July of that year, signed to Jennifer Lynn Affleck.
“If you stay here long enough, maybe you’ll drive through the Tunnel of Love in Las Vegas at 12:30 in the morning and have the best moment of your life with your children and the person you’ll spend your life with,” she wrote in her newsletter.
The couple flew to Las Vegas, lined up with four other couples with their marriage licenses and got married just after midnight at the Little White Wedding Chapel, where a short musical number played on the chapel’s Bluetooth speakers as they walked down the aisle, Lopez said. She called it the best night of the couple’s lives.
A month later, they held a grand wedding at Affleck’s home in Georgia in the presence of relatives and friends.
Both have been married before. Affleck, 52, married Jennifer Garner in 2005 and has three children with her. They divorced in 2018.
Lopez, 55, has been married three times before. She was briefly married to Ojani Noa from 1997 to 1998 and to Cris Judd from 2001 to 2003. She married singer Marc Anthony in 2004 and had 14-year-old twins ten years later. In 2017, she began dating former baseball player Alex Rodriguez, but the couple called off their engagement in 2021.
Lopez has long been more than willing to speak out about her and Affleck’s relationship journey, and when asked earlier this year if she was harder on herself because her relationship was so high-profile, Lopez agreed.
“Oh, yeah. 100 percent. It made me doubt myself and really feel bad about myself at times. It made me feel like I wanted to give up at times. But ultimately, I feel like you have to learn how to navigate it,” she told the AP. “You take the things that might be constructive about it and use them, and the rest you just throw out, like the hate or whatever, and then be like, ‘Whatever. I know who I am and I know what I want to do.'”
Affleck himself expressed admiration for her composure, telling the Associated Press last year that he agreed that Hollywood was unsure how to capitalize on her wide-ranging talents.
“I think she’s at the peak of her powers,” Affleck said at the time. “A lot of the reason she’s achieved so much is because she’s willing to take responsibility for what she does and not say, ‘This is the job I was given.'”
Lopez will star in the upcoming film Unstoppable, which is produced by Affleck and Matt Damon’s Artists Equity.
In May, she starred in the Netflix film Atlas. At the end of the month, she abruptly canceled her 2024 North American tour, saying she was “heartbroken and sad” to disappoint her fans, but the move was necessary. “Jennifer will take time off to be with her children, family and close friends,” organizers said in a statement.
The tour, her first in five years, is to promote her first solo album in a decade, This Is Me… Now, and its companion film, a fictionalized documentary about her long love life.
“When I was a little girl, they would ask me what I wanted to be. Ever since I was little, I wanted to be a woman in love,” Lopez sings in the title track.
The album was inspired by her rekindled romance with Affleck, she says. But the film is more “about your journey as a person, about the journey of a person and what it takes to go from heartbreak to love again. Or the journey of a hopeless romantic trying to find love.” In the film, she plays a character called “The Artist,” who, likewise, decides at a young age what she wants to be when she grows up: “In love.”
But the road was not smooth. In an early scene, the artist rides on the back of a motorcycle, crossing a beach with a handsome man in a mask. Then the motorcycle crashes.
“Not all love stories have happy endings,” she said.
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