I may be a noted divorce stan, but that doesn’t mean I would actually wish the end of a marriage on anyone, even two people as legendarily hot and famous as Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck. The once-golden, twice-engaged couple has officially been divorced since last August, and while I’m sure the process has been difficult in myriad ways (not least because of all the weirdos like me constantly blogging about it), they genuinely seem at peace. Why, Ben has even gone one whole Jennifer back in his relationship history and played an intimate-seeming game of paintball with his ex and the mother of his kids, Jennifer Garner! (I mean, we all remember the scene from 10 Things I Hate About You where Kat and Patrick make out on the paintball field, right? Objectively hot stuff!)
Ironically, in denying to GQ that there’s anything interesting about his divorce from Lopez, Affleck seems to have done the most interesting thing of all. “Yeah, there’s no scandal, no soap opera, no intrigue,” he said of his split. “The truth is, when you talk to somebody, ‘Hey, what happened?’ Well, there is no: ‘This is what happened.’ It’s just a story about people trying to figure out their lives and relationships in ways that we all sort of normally do.” Okay, I get that this is the opposite of the effect Affleck is trying to have, but…what a story, indeed! I’m seated for this slow-paced, quietly devastating Nicole Holofcener movie of a breakup narrative!
One of the most useful pieces of relationship advice my mom has ever given me is that you can never really know what’s going on in someone else’s marriage, even if said marriage contains one brooding big-screen hunk and one extremely famous pop singer and actress who got robbed of her rightly deserved Oscar for Hustlers (no, I will never shut up about this cinematic injustice until the Academy atones for its mistake, sorry). So, try as Affleck might to paint his split from Lopez as humdrum and run-of-the-mill, I am now riveted by the mystery of it. If they’re so normal and drama-free, do they vet each other’s post-divorce dates? Are they still taking each other’s kids on shopping trips? Are they in a group text with Jen Garner called “Two Jens and a Ben”? Is that a good title for the reality co-parenting series I would very much like the formerly entangled trio to pitch to Bravo? My questions abound!
