The truth about Bennifer
Ben and Jenny on the chopping block.
Lower the flags, dim the lights, fill the thurible right up to the top with J-Lo Glow – love is dead, hell is real, and Ben Affleck’s back tattoos must find a new manicured set of nails to be scratched by. Yes, just in case you’ve been living inside Keir Starmer’s gummed-up tub of Dax Wave’n’Groom for the last few days, Bennifer is kaput. After that TikTok-perfect surprise Vegas wedding and two years to the day since they cemented their second chance romance with a huge ceremony in Georgia, Hollywood’s biggest high-maintenance nightmares became free to terrorise other singletons.
I have written before about our bizarre fascination with celebrity breakups, how we see stars as avatars or tamagotchis, living out their traumas for our entertainment. We are deeply invested, but unlike crypto and that new build we just bought that’s scarily close to a flood plain, there is no risk to us personally. We may feel genuinely sad for a moment or two if we’re that way inclined, just to show we’re not monsters, but all it takes is another Taylor Swift relationship rumour or Jonathan Bailey posing in denim cutoffs, and our budgerigar attention span is lured elsewhere.
Perhaps this one does sting a little harder, though, with it being a sequel. Many of us have that breakup or that one-nighter or even that unconsummated flirtation or fixation on a stranger on a dance floor where we think: what if? The original blockbuster Bennifer relationship played out in comparatively more innocent times, at the apex of the celebrity gossip era, before the intrusion and, dare I say this very overused word, the parasocial nature of our interest in the famous didn't yet feel overly icky. Big stars still willingly gave interviews and posed for paps, and the Hollywood publicity machine still commanded a few crumbs of reverence. It was the world of Popbitch, and the 3am Girls, and Heat magazine, long before we relied on indecipherable blind items on crummy IG accounts and TMZ chasing ambulances across Beverly Hills.
We followed J-Lo and Ben’s love lives as you might the ups and downs of a sexier, more interesting family member. Ben’s appearance in the ‘Jenny from the Block’ video, playing an exasperated version of himself that would certainly take its sweet time to imitate art but was always in the post, seemed to give their relationship an elevated status among their other dalliances. No commitment stronger than embedding your lover in your back catalogue – but even celluloid displays of unity can’t keep your together.
When Bennifer 1.0 ended, and the engagement ring was pushed to the back of Jen’s drawer, and she began moving her Juicy Couture tracksuits out of his condo, few of us were hysterical.
It was seen perhaps as inevitable, not least because of that interview Affleck gave to Vanity Fair, batting away the slutshaming suggestions that his fiancée was going through engagements like I can chow through funsize Double Deckers (swiftly, greedily, wantonly) by calling her ‘ extremely chaste’. ‘None of your business’ would probably have done, I reckon, Ben.
We moved on, and so did they. Both married other people and had children, and that seemed to be a full stop. But once those marriages had failed, and the rekindling of the faded embers began, that full stop curled out into a comma, and suddenly we were taken back to that halcyon era, which for some of us may have been our prime. This time, it had to work. Right?
In life, most of us shoot our shot and miss, or have one chance and blow it. Ben and Jen’s reunion rewrote their lore and we swallowed it – perhaps they did too. Rather than a brief subplot in the pair’s myriad engagements, Bennifer 1.0 became the great lost love, the couple who were meant for each other. They played into this once rejoined, starring in a Dunkin’ Donuts ad together and, excruciatingly, there was a made-for-TV movie where Lopez proclaimed she had found her true love. Maybe this was the final straw for them both – the movie was released in February, and court papers claim they separated in April.
You have to wonder, at what point did they realise nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. When did the truth hit them, that they’d probably be better off as f•ck buddies? Do they feel embarrassed at all, or is it to be shrugged off like their numerous flops or previous relationships? What have they told their children? How will they divide their belongings? Because, you see, for all the pair’s glitz and wealth and total disassociation from reality, this is just a second chuck of the dice that didn't work out.
They forgot the golden rule of going back to the ex – nothing has changed but the date. Everything that annoyed you about them before is still there, except now it’s more deeply set, and it isn’t a quirk, it’s a habit, it’s a rule, a dealbreaker. They have lived for goodness knows how many years without you, there has been time to convince themselves that they will be different this time, or you were the problem but you’re grown, or, even worse, that it’s somehow romantic that you stayed exactly the same. They are wrong. They are stupid. And both of you are less firm, and more impatient.
Imagine not learning a lesson from the icons of off-and-on again, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. No sooner had the solicitors’ cheques cleared from the first divorce than they were back in the ball pool of wedded hell, realising that what drove them mad about each other was still present and correct. Not that we care. We’ll never let go. They can uninvent magazines and the internet and we’ll still yap about this for decades to come. Whatever the reason for the split – and I’m sure it’s a good one to make Jen file for divorce on her wedding anniversary – they can marry and divorce a hundred others, never lay eyes on each other again, sit in separate urns at opposite ends of the planet for all eternity, but it won’t make a difference. Bennifer is for ever.
And we’ll always have the ‘Jenny from the Block’ video:
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