The truth about Bennifer

Ben and Jenny on the chopping block.

“I don’t want to share curly fries – I want my own.”

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.