After just over two years of marriage, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez have filed for divorce.
According to a report from Variety magazine, Lopez filed on Tuesday in Los Angeles county superior court. The official separation date is listed as 26 April.
The pair married in Las Vegas in July 2022 after re-sparking their relationship from two decades prior. Lopez, 55, and Affleck, 52, started a relationship in the early 2000s which the tabloids dubbed “Bennifer” at the time.
“Love is beautiful. Love is kind. And it turns out love is patient. Twenty years patient,” wrote Lopez in announcing their first, quickie Las Vegas wedding that July, and signing off as Jennifer Lynn Affleck.
After their Las Vegas nuptials, the two married again in a lavish ceremony in Georgia on 20 August 2022 – exactly two years ago.
The dissolution of their marriage follows reports that the two had been living separately. The pair had sold their Beverly Hills home and, in May, Lopez announced on her website that she was “heartsick and devastated” to be cancelling her This Is Me … Live summer tour.
“Please know that I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t feel that it was absolutely necessary,” she said, promising her fans that they’d be “together again”.
The tour was to be her first in five years, in support of her first solo album in a decade, This Is Me ... Now and its companion film, a fictionalized look at her long love life, and a documentary.
The album, she said, was inspired by her rekindled relationship with Affleck. But the film was more “about your journey as a person, it’s about one person’s journey and what it takes to get from heartbreak back to love. Or a hopeless romantic’s journey in their search for love.” In the movie, she played a character called The Artist who, similarly, had decided as a child what she wanted to be when she grew up: “in love”.
Lopez and Affleck first met in 2001 on the set of the movie Gigli, in which they played criminals stuck on the same job. Their real-life friendship eventually turned into a relationship that caused a media frenzy as paparazzi took to calling the pair Bennifer in tabloids.
By November 2002 they were engaged, but their relationship fizzled out as quickly as it had begun. Their September 2003 wedding was postponed and then the couple officially broke up four months later.
Both stars moved on to other relationships, with Lopez marrying singer Marc Anthony in 2004 and Affleck marrying actor Jennifer Garner in 2005.
Lopez split with Anthony in 2011 while Affleck and Garner announced their separation in 2015.
In April 2021, team Bennifer rejoiced when the two were spotted hanging out together in Los Angeles. They were engaged a year later.
Source: The Guardian