How Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck’s Relationship Is Different the Second Time Around

Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck had the celebrity gossip world feeling nostalgic when they got back together last year, but things are different for them this time around. Lopez gave an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine back in December, where she said she believes she and Affleck will make it work for the long haul this time around. However, the 52-year-old singer did not want to talk about the romance too much.

“I won’t talk about it a lot,” Lopez warned her interviewer as they got on the subject of 49-year-old Affleck. “We’ve both grown. We’re the same, and we’re different. And that’s what’s nice. Yeah… Having a second chance at real love… Yeah. Like I said, we learned a lot. We know what’s real, what’s not real. So it’s just – the game has changed.” Lopez and Affleck dated from 2002 to 2004 and were briefly engaged during that time, but they broke it off before saying their vows.

Lopez said that she does not see another breakup in their future. She told Rolling Stone: “I don’t think we would have got back together if we thought that was where it was headed. We feel like what we found again is so much more important, and how we protect that and how we live our lives – what to share, what not to share – is the balance that we have now, the benefit of experience and the wisdom that we gained over the years.”

Lopez reflected on her first engagement to Affleck, saying that she felt like an “underdog” in the entertainment industry at the time. She said that she felt she wasn’t getting the credit she deserved for her accomplishments back then, adding: “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, because we were just too young to understand at that time what were really the most important things in life.”

Now that they are older and more experienced, Lopez believes she and Affleck have a better chance of weathering those kinds of hardships. She also noted that they are both parents now, and she feels like that helped them mature.

“It’s not really even your first love that teaches you what love is,” Lopez said. “It’s your mother and your father, what you were taught as a child that life is and love is, through how your parents are with you. Those are the things that you have to go back and work on and examine, when you are having relationships and repeating patterns and going, ‘Oh, what is this happening for?’”