When Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck started dating again nearly 20 years after calling off their wedding, their friends were overjoyed. And while their elopement showed “Bennifer 2.0” was here to stay, the three words Ben had engraved in J-Lo’s ring confirmed it.
“One of the songs that I wrote for the album, which is on the inside of this ring right here, my engagement ring that he gave me, it says, ‘Not. Going. Anywhere,’” Jennifer told Zane Lowe in an Apple Music interview to promote her new album, This Is Me…Now.
“That’s how he would sign his emails when we started talking again,” she continued. “Like, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere.’
Jennifer later described her initial split from Ben as “the biggest heartbreak of my life.” The couple met in 2001 on the set of their famous box office flop Gigli and were engaged the next year, only to postpone their wedding in 2003 and officially call it quits in 2004.
Zane said the relentless media coverage of their relationship, which was coined “Bennifer” in the press, was unlike any other in modern Hollywood at the time. He told Jennifer there “wasn’t a case study before you two came along,” which she wholeheartedly agreed with.
“No, it was a new thing,” Jennifer said. “It destroyed us. That was part of what destroyed us, the outside energy that was coming at us. And we loved each other. It was hard. It felt at times unfair, but neither one of us is that person, to be like, ‘Woe is me.’”
The media attention that reportedly spurred their split apparently hasn’t been an issue this time. Ben and Jennifer, who ended her relationship with Alex Rodriguez last year, wed in Las Vegas in July.
The couple followed that up with a ceremony at his property in Savannah, Georgia, which was attended by director Kevin Smith, Ben’s Good Will Hunting co-star and childhood friend Matt Damon and the couple’s kids from their previous marriages.
“We weren’t only marrying one another; we were marrying these children into a new family,” J-Lo wrote in her newsletter at the time, according to Page Six. “They were the only people we asked to stand up for us in our wedding party. To our great honour and joy, each one did.”