Jennifer Lopez has seen all the tabloid fodder spurred by her painful divorce from Ben Affleck, but she's not letting it get her down.
"I know that everything that’s being written and said about me, and all the conjecture of who I am as a person, is not who I am," she said in a new conversation with comedian Nikki Glaser for Interview magazine.
"I learned that a long time ago. And social media, because it came along after I had been in the public eye for a while, I don’t take it as seriously as everybody else. I know I’m a good person. I know I’m a good mom. I know who my friends are. I know my friends know who I am, my mom, my dad, all that stuff. If you hope to have a long career, you have to learn how to deal with that part of the business."
"Some people are going to love you and some are not going to understand you, and some people just want to hate you to hate you, and none of that really matters. What matters for me, as an artist, is doing work that inspires me and that I enjoy doing, whether it’s a huge commercial success or something that only touches one person that nobody ever f---ing even sees. It doesn’t matter," she expressed.
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"This is my life’s passion. I love to sing. I love to dance. I love to act. I love to entertain. I love to create. And anything anybody could say about me — and please don’t get me wrong, if I see something that’s hurtful, I’m not Teflon."
A lot of that hurt has come from her divorce from Affleck. The two reunited after previously ending their first engagement in 2004, were married in 2022, and Lopez filed for divorce in 2024. While she doesn’t regret for "one second" getting back together with the man she once called "the love of my life," she does say the experience of splitting up was awful.
"My whole f---ing world exploded," she said of that time.
Lopez noted that having no regrets "doesn’t mean it didn’t almost take me out for good. It almost did. But now, on the other side of it, I think to myself, ‘F---, that is exactly what I needed. Thank you, god. I’m sorry it took me so long. I’m sorry that you had to do this to me so many times. I should have learned it two or three times ago. I get it. You had to hit me really hard over the head with a f---ing sledgehammer. You dropped the house on me. Don’t have to do it again.’"
Lopez has been married four times, first to Ojani Noa, then Cris Judd, followed by the father of her children, Marc Anthony. She was engaged to Alex Rodriguez before calling things off and rekindling things with Affleck.
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The mother of two says this new chapter of her life has been transformative.
"I think that’s what I love about life, that there’s no arrival point. There’s only getting better and growing if you want to. It’s either growing or dying, and I don’t want to do the dying part. And yeah, there’s times when I thought I figured it out, and then life goes, ‘Let’s send you another thing and see if you fall for it. Let’s see if you really have learned that lesson.’ And I hadn’t," she admitted.
"I understand that now in a much deeper way, which doesn’t mean that I won’t make mistakes in the future, but again, when your whole house blows up, you’re standing there in the rubble going, ‘How do I not ever let that happen again?’ And then you start examining it little by little saying, ‘Okay, I did this, this was my part in it, this was what I should have seen early on, this is what I didn’t look at.' Those things are what really are the lessons."
As for how Lopez puts in the work to figure out those lessons, she told Glaser, "It’s looking back at the feelings underneath and the belief systems that we have about ourselves that make us make certain choices and create certain patterns in our life."
"And so, when you get to a point where you think that you’ve learned the lessons, and then it blows up in your face again, you realize, 'Okay, I haven’t, so what is it that I need to look at right now?' I would say, never stop looking inward, because it’s so easy to blame everybody else.'
The Grammy-nominated singer noted, "You have to be good on your own" if you want to have a relationship that's "more complete."
"I thought I learned that, but I didn’t. And then, this summer, I had to be like, ‘I need to go off and be on my own. I want to prove to myself that I can do that.’"
The "On the Floor" singer says "the most important" relationships in her life at the moment are the ones with God and herself.
"The relationship with yourself, for me, is the relationship with myself being cultivated in this moment and my relationship with god, that I think we tend to get away from at times, when you’re wrapped up with other people. And god has always been such a big part of my life."
Glaser asked Lopez the question everyone wants to know: Is she searching for another great love? "Now, it sounds to me like you have a new bar for the next person that comes along," Glaser stated.
"Here’s the thing: There’s no new bar because I’m not looking for anybody. How’s that?" Lopez retorted.
Lopez filed for divorce from Affleck on Tuesday, Aug. 20, in Los Angeles County Superior Court, two years to the date of their Georgia wedding. She did so without a lawyer, Fox News Digital confirmed through court documents. Lopez cited "irreconcilable differences" for the reason of their split, adding that they'd separated on April 26.
