Wedding bells for Bennifer! Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck are closer to walking down the aisle than you might think.
“Jennifer will tell you she’s not in a rush to get married, but her friends think otherwise,” a source exclusively reveals in the new issue of Us Weekly. “The truth is that if Ben wanted to push this forward as early as this summer, she’d be totally down with that.”
The insider added that the Marry Me star, 52, “wants the formalities out of the way so they can start their journey as man and wife sooner rather than later,” and she intends to have a big wedding.
“She definitely wants a spectacular celebration at some point and money won’t be an object!” the source continued. “They’re both committed to making this work and taking all the steps necessary to respect each other’s boundaries and learn from their mistakes the last time around.”
Lopez and Affleck, 49, first met in 2002 on the set of their film Gigli, while the “Jenny From the Block” singer was still married to Cris Judd. In June 2002, Lopez filed for divorce from Judd, 52, and began publicly dating the Good Will Hunting actor.
Affleck proposed the following November. However, the costars turned lovers canceled their nuptials due to “excessive media attention” just days before their wedding was supposed to take place in September 2003. By January 2004, they had officially broken up.
The Maid in Manhattan actress married Marc Anthony later that same year, and Affleck began dating Jennifer Garner. They tied the knot the following June.
Although they both moved on, Affleck and Lopez continued to speak positively about each other in the press. In 2020, the Gone Girl actor told The New York Times that he thought Lopez should’ve received an Oscar nomination for her role in Hustlers.
“She should have been nominated. She’s the real thing. I keep in touch periodically with her and have a lot of respect for her. How awesome is it that she had her biggest hit movie at 50? That’s f–king baller,” the Argo star said at the time.
Both Affleck and Lopez went on to have children after their breakup in the early 2000s. The Town actor shares three children with Garner, 50 — Violet, 16, Seraphina, 13 and Samuel, 10 — and the “On the Floor” singer shares two children with Anthony — 14-year-old twins Emme and Maximilian. The former couples remain coparents but their marriages have since ended. Lopez and Anthony finalized their divorce in 2014 and Affleck and Garner announced their separation in 2015.
In 2021, the Gigli costars reconnected. “They looked very happy together,” an insider told Us after the pair was spotted in Big Sky, Montana that May. “It was just the two of them on vacation together. Big Sky is a special place to Ben.”
In August 2021, the Out of Sight actress went to a performance of the musical Hamilton in Los Angeles with her teenage twins and Affleck’s daughters. The following month, the couple made their first red carpet appearance since getting get back together at the Venice premiere of Affleck’s movie The Last Duel.
Lopez announced her and Affleck’s second engagement via her On the JLo newsletter in April. “Saturday night while at my favorite place on earth (in the bubble bath), my beautiful love got on one knee and proposed,” she wrote. “I was taken totally off guard and just looked in his eyes smiling and crying at the same time trying hard to get my head around the fact that after 20 years this was happening all over again, I was quite literally speechless and he said, ‘is that a yes?’ I said ‘YES of course that’s a YES.’”
Watch the video above and pick up the latest issue of Us Weekly — on newsstands now — for more on Lopez and Affleck’s love story.
