Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck didn't get their happy ending. It's OK to mourn their second-chance romance.
Jennifer Lopez filed for divorce Tuesday, putting Bennifer 2.0 to bed on the second anniversary of the couple’s wedding celebration in Georgia. Lopez and Ben Affleck, who first got together in 2002 and ended an engagement in 2004, rekindled their relationship in 2021 before getting married in July 2022. Fans, friends and family were pulling for the couple, who separated in April. Their separation has left some devastated.
“Celebrity romances offer us an example of love,” Afton Turner, a child and family therapist, tells Yahoo Life. “We become emotionally invested like we would our friends or family’s relationships because we have love for these celebrities and feel close to them.”
The long history of the couple heightens that investment as we’ve seen them from beginning to end in the early 2000s and again two decades later, with other marriages and families in between. “This has always been her true love,” one fan commented on an Instagram post sharing the news of the divorce filing. “I really was rooting for them! I’m a hopeless romantic,” wrote another.
But why is it that people feel this way over public figures that they don’t know in real life and what about Bennifer is different from other celebrity breakups? Here’s what experts have to say.
It’s normal to be invested
We all have one-sided relationships with public figures, according to Gita Chaudhuri, a clinical psychologist and head of psychotherapy at the Balance Luxury Rehab clinic, especially given the access that’s granted to their lives via social media.
“A person who is a fan of an actor, artist or musician is engaging in a 'parasocial' relationship. It's a normal part of being alive,” Chaudhuri tells Yahoo Life. When it comes to romantic relationships, that interest can be likened to the investment that we might have in romance portrayed in film or TV. “We witness their lives through images, stories and interviews in the media. We watch their lives much like we would characters on a screen.”
This is why people express such excitement over blossoming relationships, like what we saw this year with Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. It’s also why the ending of a relationship, like the split of Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner, can incite strong emotions.
With Bennifer in particular, quite a bit of their romance has taken place in the public eye, whether it be the movies they’ve co-starred in like Gigli and Jersey Girl, the red carpets that they’ve appeared on together and even in their personal storytelling, like that which Lopez has done in interviews, through her newsletter On the JLo where she revealed the couple’s 2022 engagement and in the Prime Video movie This Is Me...Now: A Love Story.
The couple’s early beginnings also lend to a feeling of nostalgia for those who recall the young lovebirds from Lopez’s “Jenny from the Block” music video. “Both Ben and Jen came from humble beginnings — South Boston and the Bronx, respectively — and both rose to the top of the celebrity heap only to find each other,” says Renee Zavislak, a family therapist and host of "Psycho Therapist: The Podcast."
As a self-proclaimed hopeless romantic, Lopez set the stage for outsiders to romanticize the couple coming back together with expectations that it would be both her and Affleck’s happily ever after.
People love a second-chance romance
“Repeat romances are even more intriguing,” says Turner. “Even with our friends we tend to be more emotionally involved when we watch patterns repeat. Maybe we loved them together, maybe we saw the issues with them together. Regardless, we develop strong emotions and want the best for them.”
The highs and lows of Bennifer’s romance mimic the fairytale love story that so many of us know and want for ourselves — especially when there was hope of a happy ending.
“People want to see relationships survive and prescribe to the fairytale love that we believe in as children,” says Zavislak. “By idealizing stories like Bennifer's, when love triumphs over time and other partners, we reclaim that lost romantic hope. Likewise, their story hits us in our tender ‘first love’ spot. Anyone who has ever dreamed that their high school sweetheart would show up in their Facebook messages decades later to profess unrequited, enduring love can project their romantic hopes onto Bennifer's.”
For anyone who believes in true love, the reconciliation of Affleck and Lopez affirmed that belief. “As a result, it is vicariously devastating when it turns out that, in fact, love isn't enough,” she continues. “This is what the Bennifer breakup signals to fans, and it dampens the dreams many hold for a similarly fantastic love story.”
Zavislak adds that the looming deconstruction of the pair’s blended family adds to the heartbreak.
“While none of us saw what happened behind closed doors, the press showed Ben, his ex, his kids, [Lopez] and her kids marvelously melded together, cheering on the kids at sporting events and sharing holidays. Divorced parents and those wrestling with stepfamily struggles can project their situation onto Bennifer's, once again finding hope in what seems to be a perfectly blended family,” she says. “Now observers feel not only for Ben and Jen, but for those kids, who are the innocent bystanders in love's execution. Because so many families are divided by divorce, so many of us can feel their pain.”
The takeaway
“At the end of the day, humans connect and understand one another through stories. This is a love story with a long narrative that has captivated people across generations because of its public nature,” says Chaudhuri. “People love love stories, and they can see themselves and their experiences within them.”
But Zavislak says it’s important to remember that Bennifer’s relationship isn’t your own.
“The only people who really know what is going on in a relationship are the two people in it. No matter how much we think we know, whether it is about a celebrity relationship or our best friend's new love, the truth is that it's almost entirely a projection,” she says. “What we idealize in celebrity relationships is a direct reflection of what we want and dream of for ourselves. And when these idealized relationships fail, we feel the pain of our own love losses.”
“At the risk of sounding pessimistic, the other takeaway here is that the fairy tales lie,” she adds. “Life is complicated and love alone is rarely enough to guarantee a relationship's success.”
