Jennifer Lopez shared her and Ben Affleck’s rekindled love story in full, staggering detail with Vogue for its December issue. Lopez first addressed criticism that she took Affleck’s last name after marrying him this summer.
“People are still going to call me Jennifer Lopez,” she said, surprised anyone was upset. “But my legal name will be Mrs. Affleck because we’re joined together. We’re husband and wife. I’m proud of that. I don’t think that’s a problem.” She laughed when asked if any part of her wanted him to take her last name and be Mr. Jennifer Lopez. “No! It’s not traditional. It doesn’t have any romance to it. It feels like it’s a power move, you know what I mean?” she said. “I’m very much in control of my own life and destiny and feel empowered as a woman and as a person. I can understand that people have their feelings about it, and that’s okay, too. But if you want to know how I feel about it, I just feel like it’s romantic. It still carries tradition and romance to me, and maybe I’m just that kind of girl.”
On how Affleck and Lopez started dating again 20 years after their first breakup, Lopez received an email from Affleck after he provided a quote to InStyle about her. He told her that he provided “a rave” and they continued talking, then ultimately started visiting each other at home.
“Obviously we weren’t trying to go out in public,” she explained. “But I never shied away from the fact that for me, I always felt like there was a real love there, a true love there. People in my life know that he was a very, very special person in my life. When we reconnected, those feelings for me were still very real.”
They were both surprised to see their fairy-tale-like flame was still there. “I don’t know that I recommend this for everybody,” she cautioned. “Sometimes you outgrow each other, or you just grow differently. The two of us, we lost each other and found each other. Not to discredit anything in between that happened, because all those things were real too. All we’ve ever wanted was to kind of come to a place of peace in our lives where we really felt that type of love that you feel when you’re very young and wonder if you can have that again. Does it exist? Is it real? All those questions that I think everyone has. You go through all these relationships, and you’re searching and you’re connecting and you’re disconnecting with people, and you’re like, God, is this just what life is? Like a carousel, roller coaster, carnival ride? And then it settles. But the journey to that is the mystery for everybody.”
Affleck had just radiant things to say about Lopez herself and how glad he is that the core of her hasn’t changed after the decades apart. “There is something innately, magically kind and good and full of love at the heart of who Jennifer is,” he said. “That’s exactly the person I remember from 20 years ago. Maybe she sees all the changes she’s made, whereas when I see her, mostly I just see someone who has retained, against the odds, the thing about her that always made her the most incredible to me: a heart that seems boundless with love. She is my idea of the kind of person I want to be.”
Alyssa Bailey is the senior news and strategy editor at ELLE.com, where she oversees coverage of celebrities and royals (particularly Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton). She previously held positions at InStyle and Cosmopolitan. When she’s not working, she loves running around Central Park, making people take #ootd pics of her, and exploring New York City.