Jennifer Lopez is opening up about life as a single woman after she filed for divorce from Ben Affleck this past summer.
In a new conversation with Interview magazine, Lopez spoke with comedian Nikki Glaser about her new reality now that she’s on her own, telling the comedienne she’s “excited” for what comes next.
“Now I’m excited, when you say you’re just going to be on your own. Yes, I’m not looking for anybody, because everything that I’ve done over the past 25, 30 years, being in these different challenging situations, what can I f***ing do when it’s just me flying on my own … what if I’m just free?” she said.
Lopez, 55, also shared a message for people who think they need a partner to realize their full potential in life.
“For people who are romantics and love being in relationships and want to grow old with somebody, we think, ‘I have to have that to be whole and happy.’ And you don’t,” Lopez said.
After splitting with Affleck, 52, Lopez admits she goes through feelings of “being lonely.”
“It feels sad. It feels desperate,” she said of her current status.
But Lopez also maintained that her relationship, or lack of one, isn’t what defines her.
“When you sit in those feelings and go, ‘These things are not going to kill me,’ it’s like actually, I am capable of joy and happiness all by myself,” she said. “I can’t be looking for happiness in other people. I have to have happiness within myself. I used to say I’m a happy person, but was still looking for something for somebody else to fill, and it’s just like, ‘No, I’m actually good.’”
After months of speculation over the status of their relationship, Lopez cited “irreconcilable differences” when she filed for divorce from Affleck on Aug. 20 — which was two years to the day that the pair married. TMZ reported further that Lopez listed the date of separation as April 26, 2024. The website added that she did not mention any prenuptial agreement.
“The timing of the divorce was a big f— you to Ben,” a source told Us Weekly at the time.
Describing the deterioration of their relationship in recent months, an insider told PEOPLE that the Oscar-winning actor/director would go from “being incredibly happy and warm” to “the deepest, darkest behaviour.”
“It’s really hit her hard,” a source told PEOPLE of Lopez’s reaction to the pair’s split. “She’s very upset and disappointed with Ben.”
In her chat with Glaser, Lopez confessed that she likes “to think that I’m still 16, but I’m not.”
“I know I’m a good person. I know I’m a good mom. I know who my friends are. I know my friends know who I am, my mom, my dad, all that stuff,” she said. “If you hope to have a long career, you have to learn how to deal with that part of the business. Some people are going to love you and some are not going to understand you, and some people just want to hate you to hate you, and none of that really matters.”
Lopez now thinks being comfortable in her own skin is the “most important thing.”
“I would say, never stop looking inward, because it’s so easy to blame everybody else,” she said.
In the lead-up to their split, the couple had been living apart and were only photographed a handful of times since March.
One person close to the couple told PEOPLE in May that the two buckled under the intense media scrutiny surrounding their high-profile marriage.
“They just have very different approaches when it comes to media attention. Ben hates all attention and it makes him very uncomfortable. Jennifer has always had a different approach,” the source told the website.
Lopez called her quest for self-fulfillment a “lifelong process.”
“I think that’s what I love about life, that there’s no arrival point. There’s only getting better and growing if you want to. It’s either growing or dying, and I don’t want to do the dying part,” she said.
Her breakup with Affleck, who she was engaged to from 2002 to 2004 before they reconnected in 2021 and married the following year, is just another chance for her to grow as a person.
“There’s times when I thought I figured it out, and then life goes, ‘Let’s send you another thing and see if you fall for it. Let’s see if you really have learned that lesson,’” she said. “And I hadn’t. I understand that now in a much deeper way, which doesn’t mean that I won’t make mistakes in the future, but again, when your whole house blows up, you’re standing there in the rubble going, ‘How do I not ever let that happen again?’ And then you start examining it little by little saying, ‘OK, I did this, this was my part in it, this was what I should have seen early on, this is what I didn’t look at.’ Those things are what really are the lessons.