Jennifer Lopez has opened up about the period of deep soul-searching that followed her divorce from Ben Affleck, revealing she made a conscious decision to call it quits, call it all off and examine her own role in what went wrong.
Speaking on the Without intelligence podcast on Monday, June 15, Lopez, 56, described what happened after she filed for divorce from Affleck in August 2024, on the second anniversary of their Georgia wedding, no less.
“There comes a point where everything becomes so confusing and so wrong. Where you have to sit there. After my last divorce, I just sat there,” she said. “I canceled my tour and I sat there, and I was like, ‘You have to figure it out for yourself.'”
The introspection that followed led her to confront her own patterns rather than deflect blame.
“‘What’s wrong with you?’ Forget everyone. There’s no one to blame here except yourself in a way,” she said.
“Not that people don’t behave in ways that aren’t great. But, ‘What are you doing? What’s going on?’ It was a turning point for me.”
One of the most striking moments of her reflection was when she returned to the little girl she once was.
“Looking at these models, I was able to go back to this little girl and really look at her,” she said.
“That little girl with the torn nightgown, I see her right now. … Dirty feet, she walks barefoot all the time. And she just says, ‘You did this. You did all that. Give yourself a little something. A little love! Stop looking for love in other things and give it to yourself.'”
She also thanked her sister Lynda Lopez for encouraging her to be her own caretaker rather than focusing on the outside. The journey, Lopez said, has been gradual and cumulative.
“They’re all little puzzle pieces that you fit into little by little while you sit there with the oat milk and say, ‘That’s me.'”
Lopez and Affleck settled their divorce in February 2025. They had previously been together in the early 2000s and got engaged before splitting, before rekindling their relationship and getting married in 2022.
