The couple got real about their romance in 'The Greatest Love Story Never Told.'
Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck have a love story for the ages. In Lopez's new documentary, The Greatest Love Story Never Told, she and her husband recount their devastating breakup and reflect on their love today.
The pair was scheduled to tie the knot in 2003, but called off the wedding just three days before they were set to exchange vows. Nearly 20 years later, Lopez and Affleck rekindled their romance and the rest is history.
"We're totally different people now, and we're the same, and we have the same love," Lopez tells her team int the doc. "One hundred percent I have never fallen out of love with you, I had just put it over here."
The appearance of love in her life inspired Lopez to pen her new album, This Is Me... Now, and prompted her to create a musical experience of the same name too.
In the documentary, which covered the making of the musical experience, Lopez tells a crowd, "20 years I ago I fell in love with the love of my life, and, during that time I was making an album called This Is Me...Then. I hadn't made an album since then. Eighteen years later, we got back together and I was very inspired."
As she went into the studio, Lopez pulled out a book Affleck gave her on their first Christmas back together.
"It is every letter and every email that we wrote to each other from 20 years ago to today," she shares. "[He called it] The Greatest Love Story Never Told by Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck 2001 to 2021... and Counting."
That book "became like our Bible" in the studio, Lopez said, with her collaborators frequently referring it as they made the album, much to Affleck's dismay.
"I was like, 'You've been showing all the musicians all these letters?'" Affleck recalls asking his wife in the doc. "And they were like, 'Yeah, we call you Pen Affleck.' And I was like, 'Oh my God.'"
As for why Lopez decision to share the book caused him pause, Affleck explains, "I did really find the beauty and the poetry and the irony in the fact that it's the greatest love story never told, and if you're making a record about it, that seems kind of like telling it."
While Lopez tells her team in the doc that Affleck isn't "very comfortable with me doing all of this," she decided to so anyway because "He loves me. He knows I'm an artist. He's going to support in every way he can, because he knows you can't stop me from making the music I made and writing the words I wrote. That's going to happen. He doesn't want to stop me... but that doesn't mean he's kind of comfortable being the muse."
Affleck goes on to expand on his feelings, telling the cameras, "Jen was really inspired by this experience, which is how artists do their work... I certainly do the same things, but things that are private, I have always felt, are sacred and special because, in part, they're private, so this was something of an adjustment for me."
Putting his love out there wasn't Affleck's first choice, but he came to realize that doing so was part of loving Lopez.
"Getting back together, I said, 'Listen, one of the things I don't want is a relationship on social media,'" he recalls to the cameras. "Then I sort of realized it's not a fair thing to ask. It's sort of like you're going to marry a boat captain and [you're like], 'Well, I don't like the water.' We're just two people with kind of different approaches trying to learn to compromise."
Despite her husband's feeling uncomfortable with the situation, Lopez felt it important to make the project.
"What he says and what he saw in me, what he made me believe about myself, only comes from love, because nobody else could make me see that about myself," Lopez tells her team through tears. "It's very moving. I didn't think much of myself, and so the world didn't think much of me."
With that in mind, Lopez tearfully tells the cameras, "I just want people to believe that love exists. If I can use my story to do that, as an artist, that's what I should do. Maybe I'm setting myself to be criticized again, but that's what my heart's telling me to do."
Throughout the doc, the couple has plenty of sweet moments together. At one point, Lopez asks Affleck if she looks fat and he replies, "Too skinny."
Another cute scene features Lopez telling Affleck, "You're used to seeing me around the house, kind of schleppy, in my sweatpants and my striped socks." Affleck is quick to respond, "We're not doing the 'I'm not pretty' and all this bulls**t. You're gorgeous and that's what I'm used to."
Interspersed with the heartwarming moments are heart-wrenching ones. At one point, as a tired Lopez takes a break from her busy schedule, she cries over missing her spouse and feeling as if she's not fulfilling her duties as a wife.
"My husband's away at his premiere and I'm really sad that I wasn't there with him this weekend. He got great reviews. He's been working on this movie and this company for a year and a half and I just feel bad," she says through tears. "You just wonder, 'Is it worth it?' I don't know."
"You know that feeling you're just letting everybody down all the time? You're never really doing anything right? I'm sure everybody feels that way, just always feel like you're not good enough," Lopez continues. "You're not good enough at the steps. You're not good enough in the movie. You're not good enough as a partner, as a mother, as all of the things. All you want to do is be the best at all those things. It's just hard."
When the musical experience was completed, Affleck realized all of his fears were for naught.
"I don't really love being in the making of documentary about my personal life, which is why I'm so relieved that I'm not really, it seems like I might be in this, but I'm not really," he tells the camera. "I was worrying for no reason. The movie wasn't about me. It's was about the ability to love yourself. That love story is a lot f**king harder to find than Prince Charming."
Lopez agrees, saying in a confessional, "I feel like I came out the other side. I've made it through. I've made something good of my life. I'm proud of that. But one of the parts of that was admitting to myself you're not perfect, you're not completely whole. And you know what? Something that's worn and older and broken like a nice leather jacket or an old pair of boots is really beautiful. And kind of embracing the beauty of the scars that we pick up along the way."
The Greatest Love Story Never Told will begin streaming on Prime Video Feb. 26 at 7 p.m. ET.
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