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Kelly Rissman
US News Reporter
An old interview with Ben Affleck has resurfaced where he discussed why he thinks his relationships ended.
In 1999, before his marriages to both Jennifer Garner and Jennifer Lopez, Playboy asked the actor if any of his ex-girlfriends are “generally p***ed off” at him and his response was “mostly, yeah”.
“Probably justifiably so. If I were the next guy to go out with them, I’m sure I would be nodding in agreement about what an a**hole their ex-boyfriend was,” the Gone Girl actor told the magazine after being asked to explain why his previous partners were likely upset with him.
“It’s not like I was a womanizer or physically abusive or psychologically abusive or whatever. It’s just that these relationships never end well.”
He explained that his biggest problem stems from a lack of communication and how he’ll repeat the cycle of not telling his girlfriends when something bothers him until he can no longer handle it anymore, which ends the entire relationship.
“During the course of a relationship, if you get dissatisfied and unhappy and don’t say something, if you don’t deal with it right then, it just festers and stays there. So instead of saying, ‘Look, don’t do that, please don’t act this way,’ I go along with it until I just don’t want to be in the relationship at all,” he said.
“Then I create some incident or do something or just don’t call. And then she’s p***ed. And I can’t necessarily blame her at that point since I’ve developed such a passive-aggressive rage that I have no sympathy and tell her, ‘Well, of course I didn’t call you. If you weren’t such a nagging, shrewish harpy I’d call you.’ But that hopefully is something I’m growing out of.”
In the years following the interview, Affleck went on to get engaged to Lopez before calling it off in 2002. He then got married to Garner in 2005 and had three children together: Violet Anne, 18, Seraphina Rose, 15, and Samuel, 12.
The former couple separated ten years later in 2015 before officially divorcing in 2018. At the time, many people criticized Affleck after he partially blamed his struggles with alcoholism on his marriage to Garner when speaking on The Howard Stern Show in 2021.
“We had a marriage that didn’t work,” Affleck told Stern at the time. “This happens. It was somebody I love and respect but to whom I shouldn’t be married any longer... what I did was [I] drank a bottle of scotch and fell asleep on the couch, which turned out not to be the solution.”
“Part of why I started drinking alcohol was because I felt trapped,” he added, although Affleck later clarified in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that his behavior was “his responsibility”.
At the end of August, after being married to the “Jenny from the Block” singer for just over two years, she filed for divorce. Neither of them has spoken out about what caused the divorce, although their date of separation was listed as April 26.
