Jennifer Lopez Says She Told Herself 'You Need to F---ing Figure Yourself Out' After Ben Affleck Divorce

Tommy McArdleMon, June 15, 2026 at 8:46 PM UTC

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Jennifer Lopez on Dec. 3, 2025; Ben Affleck on Jan. 12, 2026Credit: Amy Sussman/Getty; Cindy Ord/Getty -

Jennifer Lopez described "the healing process from that tumult" she experienced after she and Ben Affleck divorced in 2024

Lopez and Affleck famously married in 2022 after rekindling a romantic relationship they originally held in the early 2000s

The former couple have remained friendly; Affleck even appeared at a premiere for her movie Kiss of the Spider Woman in October to support Lopez

Jennifer Lopez is reflecting on moments of self-reflection she experienced after she divorced from Ben Affleck in 2024.

Lopez, 56, appeared on Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes' Monday, June 15, episode of their podcast SmartLess to promote her new Netflix romantic comedy Office Romance. The actress and singer briefly touched on her high-profile divorce from Affleck, 53, after she mentioned that she has moved into a new home and that "everything in my life has changed over the past couple of years."

"What happened?" Hayes, 55, asked, to laughter from Lopez and Hayes' cohosts. "That's for a different time," Lopez responded, with a laugh. "You come over, we have a glass of wine, you come to the new house. It's amazing. I built my little corner of the world dream house, I got my kids some horses, we have stables. I was like, 'Please come home, please come back home to your horses. There's horses here.' "

Lopez said that she has experienced "a very emotional time" in recent months in part because her children Emme and Max, whom she shares with ex-husband Marc Anthony, will begin attending college at the end of the summer. "I'm also staring down — what is my life now? The past twenty years, it's been one thing, the past five years has been a tumult, and then the last two years has been kind of the healing process from that tumult where I really got to know myself," she said. "The person I am today is so different than the person I was even two years ago, it's crazy. And now I can really look at my life, appreciate it for what it is and what I've created for myself and be really happy."

She also noted that there have been times in her life where she felt "like my life blew up in my own face," without naming specific moments. "It was because of the choices I made, but also because of the fact that I had things that needed to change about myself that I didn't understand or recognize that was attracting certain things and attracting a certain type of experience into my life. So, I want to give myself that credit too, but there comes a point where it's all so puzzling and wrong where you have to sit there," she said. "And after my last divorce, I just sat there and I was like, I canceled my tour and I sat there and I was just like, 'You need to f---ing figure yourself out. What is going on with you? Forget about everybody else. There's nobody to blame here except yourself, in a certain way.' "

Jennifer Lopez on June 3, 2026Credit: Karwai Tang/WireImage

Affleck and Lopez, of course, famously dated and were engaged in the early 2000s. They broke up in 2004 and remained friendly over the years, but fully rekindled their romantic relationship in 2021 and married in Las Vegas in 2022. Lopez filed for divorce from Affleck in August of 2024, exactly two years after they held a second wedding ceremony in Georgia. They finalized their divorce in January 2025 and appear to have remained friendly since; Affleck even appeared at a premiere for her recent movie Kiss of the Spider-Woman, which he co-produced, to support her in October.

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Lopez noted on SmartLess that while she does not entirely feel she was the sole reason for the divorce, she focused on examining herself in the aftermath. "Not that people don't behave in a way that's not great, but [I asked myself] 'What are you doing? What do you have going on?' " she said. "And that was that was a turning point for me. That was a couple of years ago now."

During the episode, Arnett, 56, also related realizing that he needed to more closely examine his life and his choices via therapy in recent years. "By the way, everybody needs to do that at some point in your life. It's part of being human," Lopez said.

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Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck at Kiss of the Spider-Woman screening on Oct. 6, 2025Credit: Aurora Rose/Variety via Getty

Lopez stars in the new rom-com Office Romance with Ted Lasso's Brett Goldstein, who wrote the movie. The film is her first project since Kiss of the Spider Woman, aside from an uncredited cameo in last December's Anaconda reboot. Affleck, meanwhile, starred in a sequel to his action movie The Accountant in 2025 and costarred with Matt Damon in another Netflix movie, the crime thriller The Rip, earlier this year. He will next star in an upcoming movie titled Animals that he also directed, which does not yet have a release date but will also premiere on Netflix.

Office Romance is streaming on Netflix now.

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