Photo: OnTheJLo
After a video from Jennifer Lopez Affleck’s second wedding to Ben Affleck was leaked to the press, the actor/singer/producer/dancer told fans that she would share the details of her special day on her own terms—in her ‘On the JLo’ newsletter. And she didn’t disappoint. Who needs a blurry cellphone video of J.Lo serenading her beloved when you can get it all straight from the source herself?
On September 1, almost two weeks after her second celebration with family and friends in Georgia, Lopez Affleck spilled the details, starting with a romantic line from Ben’s wedding speech, which he happened to recycle from Live By Night, a movie he wrote in 2016: “This is heaven. Right Here. We’re in it now.” Of course, J.Lo didn’t mind the repeat. “I thought…how perfect,” she recalls.
Photo: OnTheJLo
Like any good rom-com, the wedding day was not with out its tense moments.“It had rained at sunset every day that week. Everyone was worried about the heat, the aptly named ‘love bugs,’ the details, would the guests all arrive on time, etc.—not to mention the thunder and lightning that arrived almost on cue each day at the exact time the ceremony was supposed to start that Saturday,” Lopez Affleck writes, setting the scene. She recalls that many of her party were also recovering from a stomach bug during the week leading up to the wedding, among other “unexpected setbacks”—like, maybe, a medical emergency which required an ambulance.
J.Lo was not deterred: “The truth is, I never had one doubt. All week I felt the calm and easy certainty that we were in God’s hands…”
God delivered. The weather was perfect, the singer Marc Cohn agreed to serenade the pair with his song ‘True Companion’—which they had first chosen as the ideal wedding song nearly 20 years ago—and all five of the couple’s children from past relationships walked down the aisle ahead of the bride.
Photo: OnTheJLo
“The twenty years between those dreams of youth and the adult world of love and family we embraced that day, brought more to this marriage than either of us ever could have imagined,” wrote Lopez Affleck. “We weren’t only marrying one another; we were marrying these children into a new family.”
Throughout the letter, she repeats that the weekend was a “full-circle” moment for the pair, who had planned to wed at the same home in Georgia nearly two decades prior. “Ben told me that the chords of the song and seeing Marc Cohn both shocked him and allowed him to feel the way both roads we had walked found their way, inevitably, inexorably, and perfectly together,” she said. “And when he saw me appear at the top of the stairs that moment it both made absolute sense while seeming still impossibly hard to believe, like the best dream, where all you want is never to awaken.”
“I would have had many of the same thoughts probably had I not been focusing so hard on not tripping over my dress, but when I got close enough to see his face, it made the same wonderful sense to me. Some old wounds were healed that day and the weight of the past finally lifted off our shoulders. Full-circle—and not at all the way we planned it. Better.”
Are you crying yet? No?
In addition to the ceremony recap, Lopez Affleck also shared more photos from the full wedding weekend–from the rehearsal dinner to the reception to the morning after brunch (she’s very proud of those brunch decorations, by the way). Sure, we may not have gotten the low down on that new song she sang to Ben, but as usual, the 53-year-old came prepared to give the people what the want: A happily ever Bennifer.
Originally published in Glamour.com
