J. Lo Says She Had 'PTSD' Before Ben Affleck Wedding After Previous Split
Six months after saying “I do” in Sin City, Jennifer Lopez is sharing new details of her and Ben Affleck’s Las Vegas nuptials.
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“We were planning to get married in August in Savannah, the family was going to be there, everyone’s going to be there, and it was so stressful. A month before, and I don’t know if you guys know this, but 20 years ago we were supposed to get married,” Lopez, 53, began on Jimmy Kimmel Live on Wednesday, January 18.
After Jimmy Kimmel said with a laugh, “I heard that,” she continued: “And it kind of all fell apart back then and this time, I absolutely had a little PTSD and I was like, ‘Is this happening?’”
The Shotgun Wedding star and Affleck, 50, were engaged in the early 2000s, calling off their wedding ahead of their 2004 split due to “excessive media attention.” The twosome got back together in 2021.
“We were so happy, but I just felt the wedding was so stressful,” Lopez continued on Wednesday. “And one day Ben just said, ‘F—k it, let’s just go to Vegas and get married tonight.’ … He was like, ‘Go to rehearsal [for your show], when you get back here I’m going to have everything all set up.’”
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Us Weekly confirmed last year that Lopez and Affleck wed at The Little White Wedding Chapel just before midnight on July 16, 2022.
“It was very funny because you have to go and get the license first and the whole thing. We were standing at, not the DMV, but whatever the county clerk’s office and we are just standing there and Ben’s standing there and there is this couple in front of us with a baby, a gay couple behind us. We were just, like, in line with them from 10 to midnight,” she continued. “We went at the last, last minute. Everybody was kind of chill. Nobody was freaking out or anything, but they were talking to us like, ‘Hey what are you doing here?’ And we were like, ‘We are getting married.’”
When Lopez shared snaps of the wedding at the time, she confirmed her 14-year-old twins — Emme and Maximilian — whom she shares with ex-husband Marc Anthony were in attendance as witnesses. While talking to Kimmel, she noted that “three of our kids” were at “camp.” Affleck shares Violet, 17, Seraphina, 14, and Samuel, 10, with ex-wife Jennifer Garner.
“They said, ‘Do you need Elvis?’ and we were like, ‘No, we don’t need the Elvis impersonator, just whoever is there who can legally marry us that’s who we will take,’” Lopez added.
The couple went on to wed again in Georgia in August 2022. While all five kids were present for the second ceremony, Kimmel inquired about what happened to his invitation.
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“I could say that same thing — aren’t you and Ben, like, really good friends?” she replied.
“Well, that’s what I thought, yeah,” the host quipped. “Ben was certainly at my wedding. I’m wondering if maybe Matt Damon had something to do with it?”
Fans of Lopez will get more insight into Bennifer — a nickname she told Kimmel that she’s “learned to embrace” — when she releases her upcoming album, This Is Me Now, which includes a track titled “Dear Ben Part Two.”
“I did an album 20 years ago that, obviously, had a song called ‘Dear Ben’ on it that was about the time that me and Ben were together then. I got very inspired when we got back together,” she explained. “It was kind of like a miracle and something that neither one of us really ever thought would happen and I went into the studio, and I wrote an album in two months.”
After Kimmel read some of Dear Ben’s racy lyrics, Lopez concluded: “I was younger then. I felt that those lyrics are really innocent. This album is obviously 20 years older and so are we.”
