Tuesday, June 16, 2026 - Jennifer Lopez is reflecting on one of the most difficult turning points in her life, and she says it came after her divorce from Ben Affleck.
Lopez, 56, appeared on Will Arnett, Jason
Bateman and Sean Hayes' Monday, June 15, episode of their
podcast SmartLess to promote her new Netflix romantic
comedy Office Romance. The actress and singer briefly touched
on her high-profile divorce from Affleck, 53, after she mentioned that she has
moved into a new home and that "everything in my life has changed over the
past couple of years."
"What happened?" Hayes, 55, asked, to laughter from Lopez and Hayes' cohosts. "That's for a different time," Lopez responded, with a laugh. "You come over, we have a glass of wine, you come to the new house. It's amazing. I built my little corner of the world dream house, I got my kids some horses, we have stables. I was like, 'Please come home, please come back home to your horses. There's horses here.' "
Lopez said that she has experienced "a very emotional
time" in recent months in part because her children Emme and Max,
whom she shares with ex-husband Marc Anthony, will begin attending
college at the end of the summer.
"I'm also staring down — what is my life now? The past 20 years, it's been one thing, the past five years has been a tumult, and then the last two years has been kind of the healing process from that tumult where I really got to know myself," she said. "The person I am today is so different than the person I was even two years ago, it's crazy. And now I can really look at my life, appreciate it for what it is and what I've created for myself and be really happy."
She also noted that there have been times in her life where
she felt "like my life blew up in my own face," without naming
specific moments. "It was because of the choices I made, but also because
of the fact that I had things that needed to change about myself that I didn't
understand or recognize that was attracting certain things and attracting a
certain type of experience into my life. So, I want to give myself that credit
too, but there comes a point where it's all so puzzling and wrong where you
have to sit there," she said.
"And after my last divorce, I just sat there and I was like, I canceled my tour and I sat there and I was just like, 'You need to f---ing figure yourself out. What is going on with you? Forget about everybody else. There's nobody to blame here except yourself, in a certain way.' "
Affleck and Lopez, of course, famously dated and were
engaged in the early 2000s. They broke up in 2004 and remained friendly over
the years, but fully rekindled their romantic relationship in 2021 and married
in Las Vegas in 2022. Lopez filed for divorce from Affleck in August of 2024,
exactly two years after they held a second wedding ceremony in Georgia. They
finalized their divorce in January 2025 and appear to have remained friendly
since; Affleck even appeared at a premiere for her recent movie Kiss of
the Spider-Woman, which he co-produced, to support her in October.
Lopez noted on SmartLess that while she
does not entirely feel she was the sole reason for the divorce, she focused on
examining herself in the aftermath. "Not that people don't behave in a way
that's not great, but [I asked myself] 'What are you doing? What do you have
going on?' " she said. "And that was that was a turning point for me.
That was a couple of years ago now."
During the episode, Arnett, 56, also related realizing that
he needed to more closely examine his life and his choices via therapy in
recent years. "By the way, everybody needs to do that at some point in
your life. It's part of being human," Lopez said.
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