DAILY BEAST
Never in my life have I been so emotionally invested in the love story of two people who seem to miserably hate each other.
And yet! Here I am, mourning the death of true, absolutely unpleasant-seeming love. Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, I was rooting for you.
There are few guilty pleasures in life more worth indulging in than investing delusionally in celebrity relationships. Do they ever work out? Of course not! My own relationships with perfectly normal people never work out. Why would expect it to once millions of dollars, international careers, and paparazzi are introduced to the mix?
Yet here I am, pondering whose at fault and who could have saved things in the Second Coming of the J.Lo/Affleck relationship, as if I know these people.
What I will say is this: There was something intoxicating about two people who we saw 20 years ago be the victims of vulture tabloids rekindling a romance decades later, with more wisdom and perspective of that love. Through their extreme celebrity, they delivered an intimate, relatable lesson: Maybe we all, too, can grow. I may be old and extremely gay now, but it made me think that there’s hope yet still for me and Ashley M., my first grade girlfriend.
As a bitter, single person (who very much wants a husband; DM me!), I’m fascinated by this idea of revisiting a relationship every 20 years. Of all the things that celebrities do that seem absolutely crazy to me, this actually seems remarkably healthy. Sure, it may not work out, as J.Lo and Ben proved. But what a fascinating, strange exercise it must be to not just revisit your love, but look at a reflection of yourself through a partner’s eyes and see how you’ve changed over the years.
One of the most viral responses to the big breakup was to root for Lopez and Affleck to get married again in another 20 years. At first I thought it was silly. Now I think it’s genius.
