Just under a year after getting back together, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck are engaged.
On Friday evening, Lopez shared a clip of herself on Twitter saying, “I have a really exciting and special story to share. So if you’re not part of my inner circle, you have go to onthejlo.com to hear this one. I don’t know if you guys know what that is, but it is my inner circle where I share my more personal things — and this one is definitely… ‘on the JLo.’ ” Though Lopez’s newsletter is only accessible via email signup, fans quickly shared snippets on Twitter of Lopez admiring an emerald-cut pale green ring.
The couple originally met on the set of Gigli in 2001 and were engaged in fall 2002, but eventually delayed their wedding before ending their relationship in 2004. Lopez and Affleck respectively went on to wed Marc Anthony and Jennifer Garner, but the stars — who also worked together on 2004’s Jersey Girl — rekindled their romance in May 2021.
In January, Affleck opened up about how the public obsession with “Bennifer” led to major changes to their first film together. “It’s a sort of horse’s head on a cow’s body,” he said of the changes made to Gigli. “The studio at the time was intoxicated with the idea, because I had begun having this relationship with Jennifer Lopez, which was selling a lot of magazines and appeared to generate a lot of enthusiasm — they just predictably latched onto, ‘The [public] want a romantic comedy, they want the two of them together. They want to see that. More of it!’ And it was just, it was like that SNL sketch. Bad idea.”
“I didn’t go into it blindly. I knew that Sean Penn and Madonna were a tabloid story when I was young. I knew that could happen,” he added of the media attention. “Jennifer and I happened to be together at a time where the whole industry of celebrity journalism, if you want to call it that, sort of exploded. But I thought, ‘S—, this is really not how I had hoped to go, where I’m going to be, what? Famous for being an a–hole or a failure and not able to work?’
“I can’t think of a worse outcome,” he continued. “Because I’ve never found any virtue in fame at all, short of like, I’ve probably gotten out of a couple of [traffic] tickets. I’ve gotten reservations at restaurants. But the whole point was to be able to do this job. That was it. Otherwise, what is it worth? It’s corrosive. It changes the relationships you have with other people. But one of the things that time has shown me is that it is oftentimes those moments of crisis or pain or perspective that actually engender change. That are strong enough to make you to go, ‘F— it. Well, this doesn’t work. I got to do something different.’ I’ve definitely learned more from failure than I have from success.”
Their romance 2.0 began shortly after Affleck praised Lopez in a cover story featuring quotes from her friends, colleagues, and A-list admirers. “I thought I had a good work ethic, but I was completely humbled and blown away by what [Lopez] was committed to doing day in and day out, the seriousness in which she took her work, the quiet and dedicated way she went about accomplishing her goals, and then how she would go back and redouble her efforts,” Affleck told InStyle in April 2021. “She remains, to this day, the hardest-working person I’ve come across in this business. She has great talent, but she has also worked very hard for her success, and I’m so happy for her that she seems, at long last, to be getting the credit she deserves.”
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