Jennifer Lopez has opened up about the period of deep self-reflection that followed her divorce from Ben Affleck, revealing she made a conscious decision to stop, cancel everything and examine her own role in what had gone wrong.
Talking about Smartless podcast on Monday, June 15, Lopez, 56, described what happened after she filed for divorce from Affleck in August 2024, on the two-year anniversary of their wedding celebration in Georgia, no less.
“There comes a point where it’s all so puzzling and wrong. Where you have to sit there. After my last divorce, I just sat there,” she said. “I canceled my tour and I was sitting there and I was like, ‘You’ve got to fucking figure yourself out’.”
The soul-searching that followed led her to confront her own patterns instead of deflecting blame.
“What’s going on with you?” Forget about everyone else. There’s nobody to blame here but yourself in a certain way,” she said.
“Not that people don’t act in ways that aren’t great. But, ‘what are you doing? What are you up to?’ It was a turning point for me.”
One of the most striking moments of her reflection involved going back to the little girl she once was.
“When I looked at those patterns, I was able to go back to that little girl and really look at her,” she said.
“The little girl with the torn nightgown, I can see her right now. … Dirty feet walking around barefoot all the time. And just kind of say, ‘You did this.’ You did all this. Give yourself a little finger something. A little love! Stop looking for love in other things and give it to yourself.”
She also credited her sister Lynda Lopez for encouraging her to be her own keeper instead of focusing outward. The journey, Lopez said, has been gradual and cumulative.
“It’s all little puzzle pieces that you fit in little by little as you sit there with the oat milk and say, ‘That’s me.'”
Lopez and Affleck settled their divorce in February 2025. They had previously been together in the early 2000s and were engaged before splitting before rekindling their relationship and marrying in 2022.
