Wherefore art thou, Romeo? Jennifer Lopez spent a lot of years looking for her one true love, but after three failed marriages and a string of other heartbreaks, she realized she needed to make a change. Real life, she says, is not like the romantic comedies for which she's so famous.
"I feel like, when we're kids, you're sold into this fairy-tale idea of what love is — that Prince Charming is gonna come along and save you, and you're gonna live happily ever after," the Maid in Manhattan actress, 45, told Maria Shriver in an interview for the Today show airing Nov. 3 and 4. "[He's] gonna rescue me from the Bronx, and we're gonna go off and live in a castle somewhere and it's gonna be awesome. He's gonna love me forever, and I'm gonna love him forever, and it's gonna be real easy. And it's so different than that."
The True Love author — whose exes include Ben Affleck, Cris Judd, Sean "Diddy" Combs, Marc Anthony, and Casper Smart — didn't want to give up on her idea of romance, but when she split from third husband Anthony in 2011, she felt let down "so hard." It was then, she said, that she realized she needed to love herself before she could love anyone else.
Her issues with low self-esteem had been pointed out to her years earlier by someone on her team, but Lopez thought she was "so the tough girl from the Bronx" at the time. The problem, she explained, was that she had confidence in what she could do, but not in "who [she] was or what [she] had to offer just as a girl."
In part because of that, she told Shriver, she has had a tendency in the past to jump into relationships a little too quickly. "The first person who shows up and gives me a little comfort and we have a little chemistry, boom, we're in!" she quipped.
That's something she's trying to change now. She's still scared of being alone, but she doesn't want to "make decisions based on the fear." Instead, she tries to think of the kind of love she wants for her kids with Anthony, 6-year-old twins Max and Emme.
"I want both of them to be independent, good on their own first. Like, whole people — what they have to contribute, what they have to offer," she explained on Today.
Which is a lot. "They save me," the "Booty" singer told Shriver. "Their love and loving them and them coming into my life really made me reevaluate what I was doing with my life, and the relationships and the choices I was making in relationships sometimes."
