Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez in 2023
Credit: Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency / BACKGRID
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Jennifer Lopez says she “had to stop everything” and take a year off after filing for divorce from ex Ben Affleck in 2024
“I just decided to be home and sit in what had happened without running away from it through work, through another person, through anything — just sit,” said Lopez
Lopez also said that she is “so happy” being single and focusing on her kids at the moment
After her divorce from Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez says she was done “running away.”
In a preview of her upcoming interview on Nightline that aired Wednesday, March 11, on Good Morning America, the singer-actress, 56, told anchor Juju Chang that she put everything on pause after filing for divorce from Affleck, 53, in 2024.
“I had to stop everything and I took a year off. I canceled tours,” Lopez told Chang, referring to the May 2024 cancellation of her This Is Me… Live tour. “I just decided to be home and sit in what had happened without running away from it through work, through another person, through anything — just sit.”
The star then added that, in addition to processing what she had been through, it was her kids who took precedence over all else in the wake of her and Affleck’s high-profile split.
“I needed to be home with my kids,” she said of her twins, whom she shares with ex-husband Marc Anthony, adding that the teens were “the priority at that time.”
“I was just at a point where I was like, ‘What is going on with you?’ Because I couldn’t blame anybody else because I don’t think that that’s where the lesson is,” Lopez added, “and so I really wanted to figure myself out.”
Elsewhere in the Nightline interview, the mom of two revealed that she is “happy” and loving single life at the moment. Asked if she is “dating up a storm,” the star laughed and told Chang, “No. I’m not! God forbid, I don’t want to ruin anything!”
As for what there is to “ruin,” Lopez went on to explain that she is loving her life as it is at the moment. “It’s so nice right now. I’m so happy,” the star said. “It’s the best. I just feel really good right now.”
“And that was the scary thing for me when I was younger. Like, I didn’t know if I could do that,” she said of being single. “I was always afraid to do that.”
Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez in February 2024
Credit: Steve Granitz/FilmMagic
The star also said that she is currently “surrounded by love” despite no current flame in her life.
“I am a mom of graduates this year who are going to college,” she said of 18-year-old twins, Maximilian “Max” David Muniz and Emme Maribel Muniz. “I am a showgirl, and an entertainer and an actor. An entrepreneur. And I am happy. I am happy. And I am healthy. And I am grateful.”
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Lopez — who is currently busy with her Las Vegas residency, Up All Night — filed for divorce from Affleck in August 2024.
At the time, a source told PEOPLE, “She tried really hard to make things work, and is heartbroken,” and added that the star’s “kids are a top priority, as they always have been.”
Lopez and Affleck had famously rekindled their romance in 2021 — more than 17 years after they initially were engaged and postponed a planned September 2003 wedding.
The stars officially broke up for the first time in January 2004, but remained friendly.
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