Sorry, hopeless romantics. Nothing lasts forever — and that includes Bennifer 2.0.
Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck are splitting up once again, after two years of marriage and 22 years of history.
According to PEOPLE, Lopez filed for divorce from Affleck on Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, listing the date of separation as April 26, 2024. Lopez, 54, filed for divorce herself, without a lawyer. Per TMZ, which first reported the news, there was no prenuptial agreement, and the actress/singer waived spousal support and is asking the judge to deny Affleck spousal support as well.
Though the couple eloped and tied the knot in Vegas on July 16, 2022, Lopez seemingly chose Aug. 20 as a symbolic date — the second anniversary of a more traditional wedding ceremony they held in Georgia.
The former couple first met in 2002 on the set of their panned crime drama Gigli (while Lopez was married to her second husband, Cris Judd), and they were engaged soon after. They also shared the screen in Lopez’s “Jenny From the Block” music video in 2003, and Affleck was the subject of several tracks on her third studio album, This is Me… Then. Alas, the whirlwind romance came to an end before anyone could walk down the aisle.
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The couple announced their first split in 2004, citing the excessive media attention, and they have since spoken at length about how the overwhelming press coverage complicated their relationship.
“It was the biggest heartbreak of my life, and I honestly felt like I was going to die,” J.Lo told Zane Lowe in 2022 of their decision to call off the wedding. Lopez and Affleck respectively went on to wed Marc Anthony and Jennifer Garner.
Then came 2021, when Lopez and Affleck set the internet ablaze by rekindling their romance. In April of that year, the couple were spotted together for the first time in more than a decade, immediately sparking relationship rumors that culminated with them announcing their second engagement.
In 2022, Lopez opened up to PEOPLE about how their revived romance differed from their early years together.
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“We’re older now, we’re smarter, we have more experience, we’re at different places in our lives,” she said. “We have kids now, and we have to be very conscious of those things.” Lopez shares twins Emme and Max with Anthony, while Affleck shares children Violet, Seraphina, and Samuel with Garner.
Lopez added, “We have been in the game in the public eye long enough to know who we are as people and what really matters and what doesn’t matter… We’re just operating from a place of love and respect for everyone in our lives and that is very important to us. We know what the truth is [and] we hold it sacred.”
On July 17, 2022, Lopez confirmed in her On The JLo newsletter that she and Affleck had wed in Las Vegas the night prior. She detailed the “best night ever” and indicated that the couple’s children were “the best witnesses.”
As their personal lives overlapped, so did their work. Lopez got intimate and explicit about her relationship with Affleck on her latest album, This Is Me… Now, and the Air actor featured in the documentary about the making of her visual album.
This past year seemed to be a rocky one for Bennifer, however, as they attended events and celebrated their respective birthdays without one another. In May, PEOPLE reported that Affleck and Lopez were not living together in their Los Angeles home.
