Bye, Papi. After several marriages and numerous romances, a reflective Jennifer Lopez opened up to Marie Claire UK about her past relationships, sharing some of the lessons she learned in the wake of her most recent divorce from her third ex-husband Marc Anthony.
The superstar former couple — who tied the knot in 2004 and welcomed their 7-year-old twins, Emme and Max, in 2008 — separated in 2011 after seven years of marriage. For Lopez, it was her third divorce, and her main takeaway from that split was to value her girlfriends.
“I think I realized they were as important — if not more important — when I divorced Marc,” the multi-hyphenate, 46, said in the magazine’s December 2015 issue. “I just realized that I had been through that a couple of times and there they still were. Like they say, ‘Men come and go, but my girlfriends are always there for me.'”
Lopez’s love life has always been of interest. The hitmaker first gave marriage a try when she wed Ojani Noa in 1997. The lovebirds split a year later. She then found love with her backup dancer Cris Judd, whom she met on the 2001 set of “Love Don’t Cost a Thing,” and married after a month-long engagement.
In an exclusive interview with Us Weekly in September 2014, Judd pinpointed why their marriage didn’t work.
“Your privacy is breached. You’re no longer a normal person,” he recalled. “You kind of sign up for that, you know? You kind of have to take it and accept it and embrace it. Once you stop fighting it, it smoothes itself over. If you try to keep that privacy, it drives you nuts and that’s why people break.”
After her split from Judd, Lopez moved on to a high-profile romance with Ben Affleck; the two were briefly engaged, but ultimately split in January 2004. In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Affleck’s best buddy, Matt Damon, commented on that coupling. “He just got cast as this person that he wasn’t,” Damon recalled. “It was just really painful. It was painful to be his friend, because it wasn’t fair, you know? To my mind, nobody really got him at all.”
Love life aside, Lopez shared with Marie Claire UK that there is always a lesson to be learned. The songstress, who has an incredibly hectic schedule, realized in the early stages of her booming career. “I learned a lot from that time in my life,” she mused of the ’90s. “I did overstretch myself. I can handle it better because I go, ‘No, I’m not going to work on that day,’ or ‘No, I am going to take those three days off,’ or, ‘No, you cannot schedule [that] there.’ And you realize the sky is not going to fall, even though everybody makes you feel like it’s going to.”
Over the years, the gorgeous superstar’s perception of beauty has shifted — and so has her accompanying work. Take, for example, her “Booty” music video with Iggy Azalea.
“I wanted it to be beautiful and sexy, not sexy and raunchy,” she told the mag. “Sometimes when you’re younger, you go for raunch, or shock value, but I don’t need to do that. I did sexy things but I was always more the good girl who was falling in love as opposed to the naughty girl who was running around.”
