Jennifer Lopez Once Shared That Being With Marc Anthony Was Not Good for Her
Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony seemed to have divorced under amicable conditions. But Lopez believed that being with her ex-husband took a bit of a toll on her.
Jennifer Lopez split with Marc Anthony out of love for herself
According to Lopez, she knew pretty early on that her marriage with Anthony wasn’t going to work. The pair wedded in 2004, and divorced 2014. But they separated three years prior to finalizing their split.
“I hung in there for seven years,” she once said according to Us Weekly. “I knew very quickly that it wasn’t the right thing.”
Although ending her marriage with Anthony was difficult, Lopez felt she had to do so out of respect for herself.
“Sometimes we don’t realize that we are compromising ourselves. To understand that a person is not good for you, or that that person is not treating you in the right way, or that he is not doing the right thing for himself – if I stay, then I am not doing the right thing for me . . . I love myself enough to walk away from that now,” she once said in an interview with Vanity Fair.
The divorce may have hit Lopez especially hard as it not only impacted her and Anthony, but their families as well. Lopez and Anthony both share two children, and Lopez never expected to divorce Anthony while they were involved.
“Once I got divorced, I had to re-examine my whole life, because I waited to have kids, I had kids when I was 38, because I never wanted to not be with the person I was with and had kids with,” she once told Oprah (via Hello). “I just felt like, when we got divorced, it was the lowest time of my life, I felt like I had failed miserably and that I wasn’t going to give my kids what they needed.”
Jennifer Lopez felt collaborating with Marc Anthony helped repair their relationship
It took some time before Lopez and Anthony reached common ground. The Hustlers star confided that it took some therapy before she felt content with being around Anthony again.
“This is a key to life, I had to love myself and be OK on my own before I could be in a healthy relationship,” she said. “I feel like, now, I’m good, no matter what.”
The pair would eventually even collaborate on a record. Lopez planned to release her second Spanish album with Anthony producing. Teaming up with her ex-husband had some surprisingly healing benefits for their relationship.
“It actually kind of repaired certain parts of our relationship that had been fractured from our marriage and our divorce and it kind of made us friends again,” Lopez told Billboard. “Like, because when we first started working together it’s how we met, we met working. And so we remembered that like, oh right, we connect on this level of music. And we have that. And that’s what the album came out of.”
Jennifer Lopez once revealed the three words that caused her divorce with Marc Anthony
Lopez asserted that she came from a family where divorce was never considered an option. She felt that philosophy applied to her own relationship with Anthony, especially after having children. But in her memoir True Love (via Goalcast), Lopez shared the three words that effectively put an end to her marriage with Anthony.
“In the midst of all this excitement and outpouring of appreciation and love, the bubble was burst with three simple words: ‘I’m not happy.’ Marc was in the middle of venting to me about things between us that had been bothering him, and I was sitting there trying to figure out where he was going with it,” Lopez recalled.
