After six engagements and four marriages, Jennifer Lopez is still a hopeless romantic, which is part of the reason why she felt so strongly about taking her new husband Ben Affleck‘s last name following their Georgia nuptials this summer.
In her cover interview for Vogue‘s December issue, the pop star responded to criticism over her choice to officially become Mrs. Affleck, dismissing the whole thing as ridiculous. “What? Really?” she replied. “People are still going to call me Jennifer Lopez. 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 added that she has also never wanted Affleck to become Mr. Lopez, exclaiming, “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? 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.”
The singer also opened up about how she and her now-husband rekindled their romance twenty years after their first thwarted engagement. Lopez explained that shortly after she and former beau Alex Rodriguez called off their engagement in early 2021, she got an email from Affleck, who had also just ended his relationship with Ana de Armas. The actor has been asked by InStyle magazine for a quote about Lopez to accompany their cover story on her, and he had reached out to let her know that he had nothing but kind things to say. From there, they kept talking and then began visiting each other at their respective homes. “Obviously we weren’t trying to go out in public,” Lopez said. “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.”
The Grammy winner cautioned, however, “I don’t know that I recommend this for everybody.” She continued, “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.”
As for Affleck, he told the magazine that “There is something innately, magically kind and good and full of love” at the core of who his wife is. He added, “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.”