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If you need reminding, the couple first started dating in 2003 after meeting on the set of their movie Gigli the previous year. Bennifer instantly became one of the biggest power couples in the celebrity world, and they even planned a lavish wedding at Ben’s sprawling Georgia mansion.
But they ended up splitting before saying “I do,” with Jennifer explaining last year that their picture-perfect romance got “destroyed” by the public scrutiny they faced at the time.
She told Rolling Stone, “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.”
Jen added, “Because we were just too young to understand at that time what were really the most important things in life.”
At the time of the breakup, Jennifer appeared to move on pretty quickly by marrying Marc Anthony just five months later. They welcomed twins Emme and Maximilian in 2008 but split in 2011.
Meanwhile, Ben married actor Jennifer Garner a year after his and Jen’s split, and he shares three children with her. They announced their separation in 2015, and their divorce was finalized three years later.
Then, in 2021, Ben and J.Lo sparked shockwaves in the celebrity world when they decided to rekindle their romance almost 20 years after their split.
The following April, Jen announced that she and Ben were engaged again, and they eloped to Vegas in July 2022. The next month, they had a significantly more extravagant ceremony that poignantly mirrored their original wedding plans from the 2000s, with Ben’s mansion serving as their venue.
And how long it took for Jen to get her happily-ever-after means that she doesn’t take any of it for granted. Just last year, in an interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music, the singer said that her and Ben’s 2004 split was “the biggest heartbreak” of her life.
“Once we called off that wedding 20 years ago, it was the biggest heartbreak of my life,” she shared. “I honestly felt like I was going to die. It sent me on a spiral for the next 18 years where I just couldn’t get it right.”
“But now, 20 years later, it does have a happy ending,” Jennifer continued. “It has the most would-never-happen-in-Hollywood ending: ‘That would never happen. We’re not going to write that because nobody would believe it’ ending.”
However, in a new interview with Variety, Jennifer has admitted that it isn’t always plain sailing. In fact, she said that the messy way that her and Ben’s relationship fell apart once before has left them both with “PTSD” when it comes to putting their romance in the spotlight.
“We both have PTSD,” she told the publication. “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.”
Which is why Jennifer ultimately went against some of the advice she was receiving from her camp about chronicling her and Ben’s reunion in her upcoming album, This Is Me… Now, and companion film.
“As artists, we have to follow our heart, and this is me following my heart and doing something that maybe everybody didn’t think was the best idea,” Jen explained. “But I had to do it.”
The new album pays homage to her 2002 album This Is Me… Then, which she recorded to capture her and Ben’s love the first time around. After their split, Jennifer admitted to quietly shelving the songs from that album because they were too “painful” to perform.
And fans weren’t the only ones to notice, with Jennifer revealing in the Zane interview that Ben had confronted her over this when they reunited.
“When me and Ben got back together, he was like, ‘You never performed the songs. You never did ‘I’m Glad.’ You never did this. You never did that,’” she shared. “I was like, ‘You’re right. It was painful.’ It was a part of me then that I had to put away to move on and survive.”
Referencing This Is Me… Now, Jen added, “The message of the album is very much, if you were wondering; if you have, like me at times, lost hope, almost given up, don’t. Because true love does exist, and some things do last forever, and that’s real.”
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