Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. Photo: Getty
Life imitating art? In her upcoming rom-com Marry Me, Jennifer Lopez plays a global superstar whose place in the spotlight complicates her romance with another celebrity. And to promote the film, she’s opening up about her romance with fellow A-lister Ben Affleck in not one but two new profiles released on Tuesday, February 1. Now that’s synergy.
“I’ve never been better,” the multitalented star told People, adding, “I feel so lucky and happy and proud to be with [Ben].”
“It’s a beautiful love story that we got a second chance,” she said, reflecting that lessons learned in the early aughts have helped them this time around: “Before we kind of put [our relationship] out there and we were naive and it got a little trampled. We’re older now, we’re smarter, we have more experience, we’re at different places in our lives, we have kids now, and we have to be very conscious of those things. We’re so protective because it is such a beautiful time for all of us.”
She added, “I just feel very happy and lucky to be in a relationship that’s happy and loving, and I want to do everything I can to protect that and keep it safe. It deserves that, it really does…. We hold it sacred.” She’s also aware that public reaction is more positive now than it was the first time they were together, saying, “There’s more of an appreciation and a celebration for it, which is nice.”
And she’s “so proud” of how Affleck matured in the years they were apart: “To see the person, the human being, the man that he is today, the father that he is today, the partner that he is—he is so everything I always knew he was and wanted to be.”
As for the future, Lopez told the outlet she’s looking for “love and happiness” and, yes, “somebody to go on the journey with and grow old with.”
To The New York Times, she again called her rekindled romance “sacred,” and said, “You learn from the past, you do things better the second time. There’s a part of it that, yes, we’re together. But there’s a part of it that’s not, you know, being so open the way we were when we were so young and in love many years ago.”
Her hard-won wisdom is that “you can’t live life and think that things are just mistakes…. No, it’s all lessons…. It’s really what can you extrapolate from it that is going to help you grow and go to the next level of understanding yourself, finding yourself and being able to be at peace with your life, at peace with who you are.”
Most important, Affleck made a cameo in this interview, briefly pulling Lopez out of the conversation and then telling her, “All right my love, I’ll see you later,” before he left the house.
Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez are living in 3022.
Originally published in Glamour.com
