Ben Affleck Reveals Compromise He Made With Jennifer Lopez After Rekindling Romance
Ben Affleck doesn't want every detail of his relationship with Jennifer Lopez to be shared all over the town.
"I had a very firm sense of boundaries initially around the press," the Oscar winner said in the Hustlers actress' documentary The Greatest Love Story Never Told while looking back at their time together in the early aughts. "While Jen I don't think objected to it in the way I did. I very much did object to it."
So when they rekindled their romance nearly two decades after they'd called off their engagement in 2003, the Argo star did cost one thing: a sense of privacy.
"Getting back together, I said, 'Listen, one of the things I don't want is a relationship on social media,'" he continued. "And then I sort of realized it's not a fair thing to ask. It's sort of like you're gonna marry a boat captain and you go, 'Well, I don't like the water.' We're just two people with kind of different approaches trying to learn to compromise."
photosJennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck's Georgia Wedding
Still, it may not surprise fans that Ben—who wed Jennifer in 2022—wanted to keep parts of their marriage to themselves. After all, he said the catalyst for their early aughts breakup "was this massive amount of scrutiny around our private life."
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So Jennifer—who shares 16-year-old twins Emme and Max with ex-husband Marc Anthony—knows telling their love story isn't exactly in Ben's comfort zone.
"I don't think he's very comfortable with me doing all of this," the singer, who recently dropped her This Is Me…Now album, said in the doc. "But he loves me, he knows I'm an artist and he's gonna support me in every way he can. You can't stop me from making the music I made and writing the words that I wrote. That's gonna happen, and he doesn't want to stop me. He wants to do that. But that doesn't mean he's kind of comfortable being the muse."
And while Ben—who shares three kids with ex-wife Jennifer Garner—understands making art based on personal experiences, that didn't necessarily make the process easier.
"Jen was really inspired by this experience, which is how artists do their work," he shared. "They get inspired, their personal life. It moves you. I know as a writer and director, I certainly do the same things. But things that are private, I had always felt, are sacred and special because in part they're private. So, this was something of an adjustment for me."
The Greatest Love Story Never Told is available to watch on Prime Video now. And to look back at Bennifer's journey, keep reading.
