Ben Affleck learned to ‘compromise’ with Jennifer Lopez on being more public with their relationship
By Lisa Respers France, CNN
(CNN) — There’s a moment in Jennifer Lopez’s documentary “The Greatest Love Story Never Told” in which she learns that her co-star Jane Fonda is worried about Lopez “overly flaunting” her relationship with Ben Affleck.
Turns out Fonda wasn’t the only one with concerns.
The project gives a behind-the-scenes look of her visual film “This Is Me…Now: A Love Story,” a companion piece to her new album “This Is Me…Now.”
The new album shares something with her 2002 album “This Is Me…Then” in that they were both inspired, in part, by her relationship with Ben Affleck.
More than 20 years ago, the couple famously got engaged and split before reuniting in 2021 and marrying in 2022.
In the documentary, Lopez notes that Affleck doesn’t exactly love being her inspiration.
“I don’t think he is very comfortable with me doing all of this,” she says in the doc. “But he loves me, he knows I’m an artist, and he’s gonna support me in every way he can because he knows you can’t stop me from making the music I made. He doesn’t want to stop me. But that doesn’t mean he’s comfortable being the muse.”
When they reunited, it’s revealed in the film, Affleck gave Lopez a book of all the letters and emails the couple had exchanged over two decades and he titled it “The Greatest Love Story Never Told.”
He was surprised, he says in the documentary, when Lopez informed him she had shared the book with the musicians working on her new album for inspiration and they joked that they were calling him “Pen Affleck.”
Their views on privacy differ, according to Affleck.
“Getting back together, I said, ‘Listen, one of the things I don’t want is a relationship on social media,’” Affleck recalls. “Then I sort of realized it’s not a fair thing to ask. It’s sort of like, you’re gonna marry a boat captain and you go, ‘Well, I don’t like the water.’”
“We’re just two people with different kinds of approaches trying to learn to compromise,” he says.
Lopez clearly appreciates the effort as she breaks down in tears during one scene in the documentary as she describes, “What he says and what he sees in me, what he made me believe about myself only comes from love.”
“Because nobody else could make me see that. About myself,” she says tearfully. “It’s very moving. I didn’t think much of myself. And so the world didn’t think much of me.”
“The Greatest Love Story Never Told” is streaming on Amazon Prime.
The-CNN-Wire
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