Jennifer Lopez Breaks Her Silence on Ben Affleck Divorce

Jennifer Lopez is opening up about learning to “be good on your own” amid her divorce from Ben Affleck. The singer and actress, 55, spoke about her “lifelong process” of self-discovery in a new conversation with comedian Nikki Glaser published in Interview magazine on Wednesday, Oct. 9, shortly after she filed to divorce Affleck on Aug. 20. 

 “I think that’s what I love about life: that there’s no arrival point,” Lopez said in the interview, conducted on Sept. 10. “There’s only getting better and growing if you want to. It’s either growing or dying, and I don’t want to do the dying part.”

“And yeah, there’s times when I thought I figured it out, and then life goes, ‘Let’s send you another thing and see if you fall for it. Let’s see if you really have learned that lesson.’ And I hadn’t,” she continued.

Lopez added that she’s “excited” to be on her own for now. “Yes, I’m not looking for anybody, because everything that I’ve done over the past 25, 30 years, being in these different challenging situations, what can I f-ing do when it’s just me flying on my own … what if I’m just free?” she asked.

Lopez later acknowledged to Glaser, 40, that she thought she understood how to “be good on your own” but realized there was more work to be done. “The work is figuring yourself out,” the Grammy winner explained. “It’s looking back at the feelings underneath and the belief systems that we have about ourselves that make us make certain choices and create certain patterns in our life.”

“And so, when you get to a point where you think that you’ve learned the lessons, and then it blows up in your face again, you realize, ‘Okay, I haven’t, so what is it that I need to look at right now?’ I would say, never stop looking inward, because it’s so easy to blame everybody else,” Lopez continued.

Lopez noted that it’s important to be “healthy” and “complete” if you’re looking for something that is more complete. “You have to be good on your own. I thought I learned that, but I didn’t. And then, this summer, I had to be like, ‘I need to go off and be on my own. I want to prove to myself that I can do that,’” she said, adding that the process was “f-king hard.” 

“It feels lonely, unfamiliar, scary,” she confessed. “It feels sad. It feels desperate. But when you sit in those feelings and go, ‘These things are not going to kill me,’ it’s like actually, I am capable of joy and happiness all by myself… Being in a relationship doesn’t define me.”