pre-mourning bennifer actually

questioning the existence of true love, etc

Quick note before we get started! The SHARK HEART paperback was released last week, so I went ahead and removed the archive paywall from last year’s interview with author Emily Habeck. Sharing below if you’d like to read it — this novel was one of my 2023 favorites!

in conversation with emily habeck

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first of all

Allow me to apologize: I have been ignoring the elephant in the room. Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, two people in whose decades-long relationship I've invested an arguably unhealthy amount of time and attention, may be separating. And I’m unwell.

The first time I took up space on the Internet to discuss this was immediately following Lopez's separation from A-Rod, in which my PR character (in its embryonic stages) suggests to the multihyphenate that she get back together with Affleck. I actually need you to not watch this video because it makes me physically ill — it was filmed in March 2021 and you can almost see the havoc that isolation was wreaking on me; purely as evidence of my long-time commitment to the Bennifer saga, however, it works. 

@colormeloverlyMs. Lopez. Jennifer. #jlo #arod #comedy #millennial #fyp #corporate #benaffleck

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For the newsletter, my pop culture window has often looked upon these two.

In April 2022:

It’s a comforting thing, to see Ben Affleck and JLo together. It tells us that the passage of time is but a mere blip, a small thorn in the otherwise rosy outlook of true love between these two people who wake up and choose chaos on a very regular basis (I don’t have a link here, the girls that get it get it). They deserve each other (I mean that in the very best way) and in this year of our lord 2022 we deserve to witness this particular modern love story.

In July 2022, when they got married:

Let’s Get Loud girlfriend, Let me smoke and drink my Dunkin in peace boyfriend. I am living in a rom-com and am but a side character in Bennifer’s world. We are so lucky to exist in a world where Bennifer is a relevant term not once but twice in our lives. Lucky! I simply love a good distraction from our ever-burning world. Fun and ridiculous pop culture news are, to me, a necessary condition of survival.

Apparently I left them alone in 2023 (boundaries are important to me), but in January 2024, when THIS IS ME ... NOW's trailer dropped and I nearly had a stroke:

I yearn for the absence of self-awareness required to deliver a film like this. What freedom! Delusions of grandeur meant nothing to me until Lopez redefined the term, and now I aspire to these newly-capped echelons.

Lastly, February 2024, after watching the film:

My life's new goal, and also coincidentally my biggest fear, is to find a fraction of The Audacity. The Gall. The Temerity. To release a project like this one. To put my legal name and my fully recognizable face and $20 million from my bank account to produce a movie with no narrative beginning or end, a cinematic ouroboros that boldly defies the very tenets of logic.

This doesn't even take into account the fact that I grew up in Miami at a time when JLo was a frequent topic of conversation (see 2004-2014: the Marc Anthony Era). All to say, I have put in the time. 

And yet you come to me, the week after I've left New York, to tell me they've allegedly broken up? These two people so unhinged they can only belong with each other? I refuse to believe it.

From Lopez’s website ON THE JLO, circa July 2022.