Jennifer Lopez has had love on the brain through the years — regardless of her relationship or marital status.
During a 2024 appearance on Carrie & Tommy’s Australian radio show, Lopez called herself “more of a love addict or a workaholic than everything else.”
Before she was a household name, Lopez’s first marriage was to actor Ojani Noa from 1997 to 1998. After calling it quits, Lopez moved on with dancer Cris Judd, who she exchanged vows with in 2001 but the twosome split in 2002 after less than one year of marriage.
Lopez got engaged to Ben Affleck later that year, but they split in 2004. The Love? artist exchanged vows with fellow music star Marc Anthony in 2004 and the pair expanded their family with twins Emme and Max four years later. In 2011, Lopez and Anthony separated.
After news of her and Anthony’s divorce broke, Lopez told Vanity Fair in 2011, “Sometimes it doesn’t work — and that’s sad. But I remain an eternal optimist about love. I believe in love.”
Following her breakup from Anthony, Lopez began dating backup dancer Beau “Casper” Smart in 2011, with their on-again off-again relationship continuing until 2016. Lopez was engaged to Alex Rodriguez from 2019 to 2021 before rekindling her romance with former fiancé Affleck.
Affleck and Lopez reconnected in 2021 and said “I do” in July 2022 and had a second ceremony the following month. Two years later, Us Weekly confirmed that Lopez filed for divorce on the anniversary of their second wedding ceremony.
Scroll down to read more of Lopez’s quotes about love and romance:
Love Is ‘Confusing’
“For me, love is the never-ending question. It is confusing. It is the answer, but it is also inundated with contradictions and complications,” she told Glamour in 2010. “It’s about years of experience in different relationships, and kind of the culmination of that, and how even to this day, I’m still learning.”
Optimistic Attitude
“It’s still my biggest dream,” she told Vanity Fair about love in 2011. “I am positive—determined to move forward with my life, bring up my babies, and do the best job I can as a mother, entertainer, and person. I now look forward to new challenges. I feel strong.”
Self-Love Comes First
“You’ve got to love yourself first. You’ve got to be OK on your own before you can be OK with somebody else,” Lopez told Glamour in 2011. “You’ve got to value yourself and know that you’re worth everything.”
Breakup Blues
“It felt like my heart had been torn out of my chest,” Lopez wrote about her 2004 split from Affleck in her 2014 book, True Love.
Reflecting on First Heartbreak
“It was probably my first big heartbreak,” Lopez said on the Today show in 2014 of her split from Affleck before addressing her marriage with Anthony. “And to have one of my best friends who I’d known for years, who I actually love and did have chemistry with, come into my life and say, ‘I’m here’ … What you need to know is, nobody can save you or heal you. Only you can do that for you.”
Having a ‘Genuine Love’
“[When I first met him] I felt like … ‘OK, this is it.’ [But] sometimes I feel like what you think people are and how you see them when you love them is different than when they reveal later,” Lopez told Jess Cagle in 2016 of her relationship with Affleck. “I think different time, different thing, who knows what could’ve happened, but there was a genuine love there.”
First ‘Good Relationship’
“I’m in a good relationship. I feel like I can say that for the first time — I don’t know — maybe ever,” Lopez said of Rodriguez in a 2017 interview with Hola! USA. “And not that I didn’t have great relationships, full of love and adventure, but this is the first relationship I’ve been [in] where I feel like we really make each other better.”
Lopez continued: “We complement each other, and that’s really pure, true love. Just wanting to support the other person and make them happy.”
Believing in Marriage
“I do believe in marriage. And I would love to grow old with somebody in a committed relationship,” Lopez told Harper’s Bazaar in 2018 while in a relationship with Rodriguez. “But I’m not forcing anything right now.”
Support in Relationships
“We love each other. We have a lot of love and respect and admiration for each other. And that is so nice and so difference. I’ve never been with someone who lets me be [my] full … self. That makes me really happy,” Lopez said of Rodriguez on Power 105.1’s The Breakfast Club in 2019. “He’s like, ‘Just go, baby. Just go.’”
Loving Herself
“I remember when I was going through therapy at the beginning, you know, kind of in my late 30s and there was a lot of talk about loving yourself and I was like, ‘I love myself,’” Lopez told host Jay Shetty on Coach Conversations in 2021. “But obviously, I was doing all these things in, like, my personal relationships that didn’t seem like I was loving myself, but I didn’t even understand the concept of it. It took time and it’s a journey and it’s still a journey for me.”
The word “Bennifer” might include flashbacks to frosted lip gloss and butterfly clips, but everything comes back in style eventually. Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez got back together nearly 20 years after their romance first took the world by storm. The pair first connected in 2002 on the set of the ill-fated Gigli. The movie […]
Love in Her Future
“I just want my future to be full of love and happiness, with my children and my partner,” Lopez told People in 2022. “I think everybody just wants to be happy, with somebody to go on the journey with and grow old with, and I feel good about that right now. To see the person, the human being, the man that he is today, the father that he is today, the partner that he is — he is so everything I always knew he was and wanted to be.”
While noting that their romance is a “beautiful love story,” Lopez added, “What I can teach my children is that real love exists. Some things can be forever, but it doesn’t mean they just have a straight line.”
Love of Her Life
“I feel like I lost the love of my life, I felt like I lost the best friend that I ever had,” Lopez said of Affleck in the 2024 documentary Greatest Love Story Never Told.
