Back in 2004, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck famously called off their engagement.
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The pair had been together for a couple of years before deciding to part ways, and ultimately went on to marry and have kids with different people.
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However, as we all know, Ben and Jen ended up rekindling things romantically in 2021 after their respective splits from their previous long-term partners — and by July 2022, they had their long-awaited fairytale wedding.
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Both J.Lo and Ben have since been super open about the reasoning behind their infamous 2004 split, with Jen telling Rolling Stone in February 2022 that their relationship was “destroyed” by the heaps of public scrutiny they were forced to endure at the time.
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“It’s funny because Ben and I were together, and we were so in love. It was one of the happiest times of my life. But also, there was this other thing happening where we were being criticized, and it really destroyed our relationship from the inside out,” she said.
“We were just too young to understand at that time what were really the most important things in life,” she added.
Last December, Jen said that both she and Ben have “PTSD” when it comes to displaying their romance in the spotlight.
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“We both have PTSD,” she said. “But we’re older now, we’re wiser. We also know what’s important, what’s really important in life, and it’s not so much what other people think. It’s about being true to who you are.”
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Fast-forward to today, and Jennifer’s recently released documentary, titled The Greatest Love Story Never Told, sheds a little more light on how they’re navigating their relationship in the public eye.
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In fact, it’s revealed in the documentary that Ben expressed his desire to keep his and Jen’s romance off of social media when they started rekindling things.
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“Getting back together, I said, ‘Listen, one of the things I don’t want is a relationship on social media,’” Ben says in the film, per Page Six.
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If you follow J.Lo on social media, you’ll know that she frequently shares posts with her 253 million Instagram followers, some of which are intimate photos and videos with — and of — Ben.
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Well, Ben notes in the documentary that while he initially hoped to keep their relationship away from social media, he learned to “compromise” with Jen after realizing that his request was “not a fair thing to ask.”
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“Then I sort of realized it’s not a fair thing to ask. It’s sort of like, you’re gonna marry a boat captain and you go, ‘Well, I don’t like the water,’” he said.
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“We’re just two people with different kinds of approaches trying to learn to compromise,” Ben added.
Meanwhile, Jen discussed Ben’s discomfort with displaying aspects of his life in the spotlight.
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“I don’t think [Ben] is very comfortable with me doing all of this,” she said of her very public career. “But he loves me, he knows I’m an artist, and he’s gonna support me in every way he can because he knows you can’t stop me from making the music I made… He doesn’t want to stop me. But that doesn’t mean he’s comfortable being the muse.”
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