When Jennifer Lopez Dealt With Her Breakup With Ben Affleck By Dating Marc Anthony

Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez got married in 2004, started living apart in 2011, and finally got divorced in 2014. The Jenny from the Block hitmaker spoke up about her turbulent separation from Ben Affleck as well as how she met and wed Anthony in her biography True Love, which was published in 2014. According to Lopez, Anthony "rescued" her from loneliness and "heartbreak", “Marc came back into my life three days after I should have been at the altar saying ‘I do’ to another man,” she said. As per Page Six, the On the Floor songstress compared her choice to marry Anthony to a band-aid. “Thinking back, maybe deep down I knew that this was a Band-Aid on the cut, that my wound hadn’t been stitched or healed,” she reflected. “But I pushed all that to the back of my mind. Because life takes unpredictable twists and turns, right? And you’ve just got to go with what you feel is best in the moment.”

Three days before their dream wedding in September 2003, her engagement to Affleck, who was 31 at the time, dissolved. “Ben and I split up at the moment when I thought we were committing to each other forever, it was my first real heartbreak, it felt like my heart had been torn out of my chest,” Lopez wrote in her memoir. The All I Have songstress alleged back then that she frequently looked for solace in another person because she was aware that some people took drugs, alcohol, or excessive partying to mend their shattered hearts. “My way of anesthetizing the pain was different,” she wrote. “I sought out comfort in another person, tried to find someone who could make me feel loved and wanted in my loneliest hour.”

As per People, Anthony had first encountered Lopez while he was appearing on Broadway in the play The Capeman, which ended on March 28, 1998. Jennifer had divorced Ojani Noa, her first husband, in the same year. According to her account in her biography True Love, the Love is All singer had told her, "One day you're going to be my wife."

Lopez met Affleck in 2002 while working on the set of their film Gigli. Cris Judd was Lopez's second spouse at the time, but in July 2002, she filed for divorce from Judd. Jennifer and Ben began dating soon after she parted ways with her second husband. However, 'Bennifer' called off their wedding just hours before they were scheduled to walk down the aisle. Lopez started dating Anthony in 2004,  "All the heartache and pain of my recent breakup couldn't have been for nothing, could it?" she wrote in her memoir. "Maybe I had to go through the bad so I could end up with the person I was meant to be with all along."

The couple welcomed their twin kids, Emme and Max on February 22nd, 2008. They formally announced their split in 2011 "after months of nonstop arguing". On April 9, 2012, Anthony informed Lopez that he was divorcing her due to their "irreconcilable differences." The former couple finalized their divorce on June 16, 2014.

Editor's note: This article was originally published on September 23, 2023. It has since been updated.