Jennifer Lopez continued her Marry Me press blitz with a new cover story for Rolling Stone. Lopez declined to talk in heavy detail about her rekindled romance with Ben Affleck, but she did address why she sees them going the distance now.
The actress also looked back on the harsh public scrutiny she endured the first time they were together (from 2002 to early 2004).
The racism Lopez faced during her first time dating Affleck was something she tried to ignore—until she couldn’t. (In one example cited by Rolling Stone, Conan O’Brien once said he’d cast “our script intern” to play Affleck and “our cleaning lady” as Lopez to stand in for the couple in a sketch.)
“It was brutal,” Lopez said of the criticism. “It was brutal. It’s one of those things that you bury very deeply so you can move on and get about your business.”
“It’s funny because Ben and I were together, and we were so in love,” she added. “It was one of the happiest times of my life. But also, there was this other thing happening where we were being criticized, and it really destroyed our relationship from the inside out, because we were just too young to understand at that time what were really the most important things in life.”
Now, Lopez doesn’t see them breaking up again. She explained why: “I don’t think we would have got back together if we thought that was where it was headed.
We feel like what we found again is so much more important, and how we protect that and how we live our lives—what to share, what not to share—is the balance that we have now, the benefit of experience and the wisdom that we gained over the years.”