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Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck are divorcing after two tumultuous years of marriage. Problems for the couple began to surface in May — before they had celebrated their second anniversary — and in filing for divorce inside the Los Angeles County Superior Court, Lopez listed her separation date from Affleck as April 26.
The resultant legal proceedings could get messy. Affleck and Lopez opted to wed in 2022 without a prenuptial agreement, so the millions of dollars in assets that they have to divide could lengthen the process. But based on recently-uncovered comments Affleck once made about marriage and relationships, Lopez might be wondering if this mess could have (or should have) been avoided in the first place.
In a 1999 interview with Playboy, Affleck — then a rising star in Hollywood after his performances in “Good Will Hunting” and “Armageddon” — got real about romance, revealing a unique mindset into dealing with a partner.
“During the course of a relationship, if you get dissatisfied and unhappy and don’t say something, if you don’t deal with it right then, it just festers and stays there,” Affleck explained. “So instead of saying, ‘Look, don’t do that, please don’t act this way,’ I go along with it until I just don’t want to be in the relationship at all.”
Affleck, who first dated Lopez between 2002 and 2004 before marrying Jennifer Garner in 2005, added that he often felt his anger boil over in relationships, and that feeling would contribute to an eventual breakup.
“I create some incident or do something or just don’t call. And then she’s pissed. And I can’t necessarily blame her at that point since I’ve developed such a passive-aggressive rage that I have no sympathy and tell her, ‘Well of course I didn’t call you. If you weren’t such a nagging, shrewish harpy, I’d call you,'” Affleck said. “But that hopefully is something I’m growing out of.”
Now 52 years old, some would argue that Affleck has yet to “grow out of” that inclination. Affleck and Garner divorced in 2018 (although the pair shares three children and remains close), and the “Gone Girl” star this summer moved out of the $68 million Beverly Hills mansion he shared with Lopez…while “Jenny from the Block” was on a solo vacation in Italy.
