Ben Affleck Just Hinted at the Real Reason He & J-Lo Broke Up: ‘The Truth Is… ‘
Ben Affleck is getting real about his relationships. The Argo director spoke to GQ about where he stands with both of his ex-wives Jennifer Garner and Jennifer Lopez for the first time since the latter’s divorce.
News of the Gigli co-stars’ divorce broke in August 2024. They were married for two years after they eloped in Las Vegas, and the divorce was finalized in January 2025. Lopez and Affleck maintained a very PDA-filled relationship on the red carpet and he even appeared in her Prime Video documentary This Is Me…Now talking about their relationship.
In a GQ profile, Ben Affleck told the outlet about how watching that doc all went down in the midst of their divorce news. “Part of it was, ‘OK, if I’m going to participate in this, I want to try to do it in an honest way and in a way that’s interesting,’” he explained. “Because I thought it was an interesting examination.”
He praised that J-Lo approached things in a way that he would never do. “There are a lot of people who I think have handled celebrity more adeptly and more adroitly than I have, Jennifer among them,” Affleck continued. “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. 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.”
“The thing that I said in that documentary or the piece that they used was where I said, 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,” he deep dived “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.”
Later in the interview, he revealed that he had “nothing but respect” for Lopez. “There’s a tendency to look at breakups and want to identify root causes or something,” he elaborated. “But honestly … the truth is much more quotidian than probably people would believe or would be interesting. There’s no scandal, no soap opera, no intrigue [about our divorce]. The truth is, when you talk to somebody, ‘Hey, what happened?’ Well, there is no, ‘This is what happened.’”
Affleck also touched upon his relationship with his first wife Jennifer Garner. Though there have been reports that Ben has an itch to reunite romantically with his first ex-wife, he gushed over their family dynamic. “We used to have a thing, my ex-wife and I, when they would see something on a supermarket stand, we would say, well, ‘You know this isn’t always true because if it were, you would have 15 brothers or sisters or whatever the number of stories is where they said that your mom was pregnant,'” referring to his three kids with her. “And I’m really lucky that I have a really good co-parent and partner in Jennifer Garner, the kids’ mom, who’s wonderful and great and we work together well.”
