Remember how Ben Affleck wanted us to just “imagine” his reconnection with Jennifer Lopez? Maybe he was taking a note from his girlfriend with that line. J.Lo is now embarking on her own press tour for her upcoming film Marry Me, sitting for interviews with People, the New York Times, and Rolling Stone, each one more evasive on questions about Affleck than the last. She told People on the cover of its “Love Issue” that she’s “so protective” of details about her relationship “because it is such a beautiful time for all of us.” (We do agree.) She repeated a line from that interview to the Times about keeping her relationship with Affleck “sacred.” (That one did feature a cameo from Affleck himself, who stole Lopez away for a ten-minute rendezvous.) And her Rolling Stone cover story, out on February 7, opened with a quote that sums it all up: “I’m trying not to say too much.” J.Lo kept her promise throughout the interview. Here, a sampling of her quotes on Affleck:
• “We’ve both grown. We’re the same, and we’re different. And that’s what’s nice.”
• “Like I said, we learned a lot. We know what’s real, what’s not real. So it’s just — the game has changed.”
• “It’s funny because Ben and I were together, and we were so in love. It was one of the happiest times of my life. But also, there was this other thing happening where we were being criticized, and it really destroyed our relationship from the inside out, because we were just too young to understand at that time what were really the most important things in life.”
At one point, she does offer a morsel to the magazine — just off the record. When writer Alex Morris asks what about Affleck makes Lopez happy (“probably more than I’ve even been in my whole life,” by J.Lo’s assessment), the star asks to turn the recorder off, presumably to share some top-secret Bennifer intel. It’s “an act that seems calculated to show the calculations she’s making,” Morris writes. And at another point, Lopez does reflect a bit on her history with Affleck, specifically their public breakup ahead of their planned 2004 wedding. “I don’t think we would have got back together if we thought that was where it was headed,” she says. “We feel like what we found again is so much more important, and how we protect that and how we live our lives — what to share, what not to share — is the balance that we have now, the benefit of experience and the wisdom that we gained over the years.” At least some of us are gaining some wisdom amid all this.
