Jennifer Lopez filed for divorce from Ben Affleck on Tuesday after two years of marriage, capping a decades-long romantic history that spawned its own famous portmanteau: “Bennifer.”
Ms. Lopez filed the petition to dissolve the couple’s marriage to the L.A. County Superior Court, according to court records. The filing, which was first reported by TMZ, was submitted on the second anniversary of the couple’s lavish wedding celebration at Mr. Affleck’s home in Georgia.
Representatives for Ms. Lopez and Mr. Affleck did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The on-again, off-again relationship between Ms. Lopez, 55, a singer and actress, and Mr. Affleck, 52, an actor and director, has been a subject of pop-culture fascination since the early 2000s.
The pair began dating while filming the 2003 romantic comedy “Gigli.” Although the movie was panned, the relationship between its stars became “the summer’s most watched romance,” according to an article that year in The New York Times. They got engaged in 2002, but postponed the wedding the following year, citing the media frenzy around their union.
The pair split and moved onto other relationships: Ms. Lopez married the singer Marc Anthony in 2004, and Mr. Affleck married the actress Jennifer Garner in 2005. (Both ended in divorce.)
In the spring of 2021, tabloids lit up with headlines that Ms. Lopez and Mr. Affleck were dating again. In July 2022, the superstars were wed at a midnight ceremony in Las Vegas, complete with a pink Cadillac convertible. They held a celebration with family and friends in Georgia in August, with Ms. Lopez wearing a Ralph Lauren gown and a sweeping veil.
“We did it,” Ms. Lopez wrote in her newsletter. “Love is beautiful. Love is kind. And it turns out love is patient. Twenty years patient.”
To some fans, Bennifer 2.0 represented a fantasy of reuniting with the one that got away, the author Jennifer Weiner wrote in an Opinion essay for The New York Times. Their romance was “a pandemic gift that kept on giving, for romantics and celebrity gossip addicts alike.”
But this year, the relationship came under scrutiny again. In May, Ms. Lopez abruptly canceled her summer tour, to which ticket sales had been iffy. “Jennifer is taking time off to be with her children, family and close friends,” Live Nation said in a statement. In July, E! News reported that the pair’s mansion in Beverly Hills had been listed for $68 million.
Ms. Lopez has often spoken at length about the relationship; Mr. Affleck has tended to be less vocal. He briefly appeared in Ms. Lopez’s “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story” movie, which was released on Amazon in February. He was a larger presence in its accompanying documentary, “The Greatest Love Story Never Told.”
“I did really find the beauty and the poetry and the irony in the fact that it’s the greatest love story never told,” Mr. Affleck said in the documentary, describing their relationship. “And if you’re making a record about it, that seems kind of like telling it.”
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