Bennifer? Bennifinished. And me? While I’m not exactly in the Benni-fetal position, it’s fair to say I’m still processing the news. When it broke in April bthat Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez’s marriage was in trouble, I held out hope that it was just a run of bad press from the same brand of naysayers who could never stop themselves from pointing out the grumpy expressions on Affleck’s mug. It’s called resting bitch face, and it’s just the way he looks, OK? But as the months wore on, it became increasingly clear that the dissolution of their fairy-tale marriage wasn’t a matter of if, but when. It felt endless, the wait for official word. It seemed unusual too, that a divorce announcement that was all but certain would take so long to materialize, but maybe that’s only because I’m not usually paying quite so much attention.
I was paying an obscene amount of attention because Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez rekindling their romance was, to put it plainly, simply one of my favorite things to ever happen. Yup, ever. Please don’t press me on this by asking something like “Was it better than Joe Biden beating Trump?” because I’m telling you now that you may not like my answer. After the darkest part of the pandemic, Bennifer 2.0 arrived in the summer of 2021 just when we needed them most. These people who I’d come of age reading about had somehow found each other again, two decades later, and rather than all the tabloid mockery of their first go-round, everyone seemed to be rooting for them, and rooting for love itself. I worried at the time that it was too good to be true, but then it lasted the whole summer. Then came an engagement, and a wedding. I eventually let my guard down. Before long, I guess I just accepted that my every happiness was tied to their union and that I’d be in shambles if they ever broke up.
Well, greetings from shambles. I’m actually not doing so badly, I’m pleased to report. I’ve been bracing myself for this for a while now, and I think it’s going to be OK. In particular, I want to thank Lopez for filing for divorce on Tuesday, the night that Michelle and Barack Obama were scheduled to speak at the Democratic National Convention. Though she probably did this to minimize publicity—headlines about the DNC would crowd out headlines about Bennifer—I choose to see it as her recognizing that America, or at least the portion of America that cares about Bennifer, was in an OK place. We are, momentarily at least, feeling good about the election, about Kamala, and maybe about the future; we don’t need our emotional support celebrity relationship to do all the heavy lifting it’s sometimes had to do. This was a kindness on Lopez’s part, and that’s something I want to hold on to, because, despite it all, I still feel invested in the idea that this relationship was based on something true.
Certain other details that have come out in reporting on the divorce bear out my belief, and my wish that whatever Affleck and Lopez too briefly rediscovered with each other, it was something they both strongly believed in. As rich as they are, Lopez filed for divorce without a lawyer (very unusual), and the two didn’t get a prenup, TMZ has reported. Whatever happened, they were all in on this relationship when they got married. Though I’ve continued to notice a tendency toward blaming Lopez in the breakup theories, one thing I’m manifesting is the idea that maybe this was no one’s fault. Maybe they tried and it just didn’t work out. In celebrity breakups like the ones Bennifer has heavily been compared to, like Brangelina or TomKat, there’s usually a clear villain, but I would love to come out of this not hating Lopez or Affleck, and maybe instead respecting them for trying and failing? Bennifer was too beautiful to last, you guys, but that doesn’t mean Bennifer wasn’t real. Is this just me in the bargaining stage of grief? Possibly. Someone stop me before I start quoting Camelot.
