Jennifer Lopez has opened up about her blended family with husband Ben Affleck and his ex-wife Jennifer Garner.
In a Vogue cover story published on Tuesday, the 53-year-old singer and actor made a rare comment about Affleck’s former partner. Lopez called the 13 Going on 30 star “an amazing co-parent” and shared that Garner and Affleck “work really well together” when it comes to taking care of their three children.
The “On The Floor” singer also opened up about the challenges of blending their families, ever since she and Affleck tied the knot during an intimate wedding ceremony in Las Vegas last July.
“The transition is a process that needs to be handled with so much care,” Lopez explained. “They have so many feelings. They’re teens. But it’s going really well so far.”
Lopez revealed that she hopes to form a special bond with her new step-children, and for Affleck to have his own relationship with her teenage twins.
“What I hope to cultivate with our family is that his kids have a new ally in me and my kids have a new ally in him,” she said. “Someone who really loves and cares about them but can have a different perspective and help me see things that I can’t see with my kids because I’m so emotionally tied up.”
Jennifer Lopez shares two children, 14-year-old twins Emme and Maximilian, with ex-husband Marc Anthony. Meanwhile, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner have three children together: Violet, 16, Seraphina, 14, and Samuel, 10.
Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck reignited their romance in early 2021, after calling off their first engagement in 2004. Shortly after his split from Lopez, the Gone Girl actor sparked a relationship with Jennifer Garner that same year. In 2005, the former couple were engaged and married just two months later. In December of that year, they welcomed their eldest daughter, Violet.
Garner and Affleck nnounced they separated in 2015, and finalised their divorce three years later. In a bombshell interview with Affleck last December, the Argo director revealed he felt “trapped” in his marriage. Affleck, who went into rehab for alcoholism in 2018, said that his marriage to Garner was “part of why” he started drinking.
“We had a marriage that didn’t work. This happens. It was somebody I love and respect but to whom I shouldn’t be married any longer,” Affleck said last year during an episode of The Howard Stern Show.
“I was like, ‘I can’t leave because of my kids, but I’m not happy, what do I do?’ And what I did was [I] drank a bottle of scotch and fell asleep on the couch, which turned out not to be the solution,” he said.
Affleck told Stern: “Both of us felt like we don’t want this to be the model that our kids see of marriage.”
The two-time Oscar winner emphasised that he and Garner made the right choice by ending their marriage, adding, “We’d probably be at each other’s throats. I’d probably still be drinking. Part of why I started drinking alcohol was because I felt trapped.”
