Featured
Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck first got together in the 2000s and then reunited 20 years later. Their relationship ended in divorce. Are all reunions like this doomed?
Starwatchers in the ’60s and ’70s had Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, an iconic movie star power couple whose dramatic on-again, off-again relationship created tons of tabloid fodder. Today’s celebrity followers have Bennifer.
Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck captured public attention when they became a couple after meeting on the set of the film “Gigli” around 2001. They got engaged, but postponed the wedding due to excessive media attention before splitting in 2002.
Nearly 20 years later, the couple reunited in 2021 before finally tying the knot a year later. The joy would only last so long: Lopez filed for divorce from Affleck on their two-year wedding anniversary.
What went wrong for the couple the second time around? Is their divorce proof that you can’t successfully reunite with an ex? It really depends on the circumstances, says Elizabeth Glowacki, an assistant teaching professor in communication studies who teaches courses in interpersonal communications at Northeastern University.
“You can successfully get back together, but I would give it some time,” Glowacki says. “For a breakup, people really need to have to process, work on themselves, think about why the breakup happened, and then just give it some time and distance to try to make a clean break.
“Maybe in the future, circumstances make it so that the two people come back together again,” she says. “But for this reconnection to be successful, people have to take the time to get to know one another, start from scratch and not just assume that that same familiarity or knowledge of one another is still there.”
The cycle of on-again, off-again relationships is a popular area of study in interpersonal communications, Glowacki says. Studies show that couples who stay in touch after breaking up fall into “toxic patterns” of reconnecting, often out of obligation or convenience, and not because the pair have addressed their underlying issues or truly desire to get back together, she adds.
“One of the reasons why people might fall into these is because it’s comfortable to get back with someone who already knows you,” Glowacki says. “It’s important for couples to reflect on why they broke up in the first place. If it’s an issue of differences in values or goals for the future, those can be really hard to overcome.
“At the end of the day, some of those core values are really difficult to change,” she says. “Sometimes people go into a relationship thinking that they can change someone, but it really is hard. It takes a lot of time and work for us to change who we are at our core.”
While neither Affleck nor Lopez commented on the reason for their recent split, fans noticed the pair’s incompatibilities when it came to the spotlight. In February, Lopez released a documentary, “The Greatest Love Story Never Told,” in which the pair acknowledged they had different levels of comfort about what they were sharing publicly about their relationship. They also said that this led to their initial breakup in the early 2000s.
Even couples who aren’t celebrities can deal with this issue, Glowacki says, as well as a myriad of other incompatibilities that can lead to splits. Some other examples include disagreements about starting a family, faith or finances.
However, if a couple split over something more surmountable, like distance, it can be possible for them to get back together happily. Glowacki says there’s stories of people who dated as teens who reconnected successfully years later.
But if a couple does reunite, Glowacki says they should consider themselves as starting anew, not picking up where they left off. This means taking some time to get to know each other again, rather than rushing into a larger commitment like marriage, as Lopez and Affleck did a year after their reunion.
“It’s healthier to start from the beginning, because that gives both partners a chance to maybe get to know one another,” Glowacki says. “You assume that you know this person so well because you have a past with them, but for partners to maybe start over and work toward rebuilding trust, and not just assuming that it’s already there.”