The second breakup of "Bennifer" appeared to end not with a bang, but with a whimper.
After Jennifer Lopez filed for divorce from Ben Affleck on Tuesday, the news quickly spread across social media. But unlike their first split in 2004, the response from the public seemed less feverish, with many online — a mix of the couple’s fans and haters — expressing that they were not shocked.
Some experts say that’s because in the nearly two decades since the two began their first courtship, the definition of celebrity has expanded to include everyone from movie stars to online influencers. With the rise of social media, the public has also grown accustomed to quickly shifting its attention to the next big story or scandal.
“When Affleck and Lopez were first a couple, they had a lot of attention and scrutiny placed on them because they were in the middle of this kind of firestorm,” said Claire Sisco King, associate professor of communication studies and chair of cinema and media arts at Vanderbilt University.
Now, “it’s just a time when we’re kind of swimming in celebrity culture,” she said. “So there’s always something to catch our attention.”
Lopez and Affleck first got together in 2002 after shooting “Gigli.” The early days of their relationship coincided with the rise of new celebrity gossip blogs, which created intense competition among traditional outlets to get the juiciest scoops on A-listers. People magazine reportedly paid up to $75,000 for paparazzi photos of "Bennifer" in 2002.
“There was a sense of entitlement that audiences really felt like they deserved to have the inside information on celebrities,” Sisco King said.
After a high-profile engagement and a postponed wedding date, which the couple blamed on the intense media coverage of their relationship, Lopez and Affleck called it quits in January 2004.
When the pair reunited in 2021, celebrity coverage was vastly different. The buzzy gossip blogs were replaced by meme accounts and TikTok takes.
The media cycle intensified, according to Andrea McDonnell, associate professor of communication at Providence College and author of “Reading Celebrity Gossip Magazines.”
“The 24-hour news cycle is now a 15-minute cycle,” she said. “Every few seconds, if you’re still on X, you can pull down and see more content, right? So there is a feeling of the pace being ever more frenetic, and that if you’re not really perpetually online, you might blink and you miss it.”
The 24-hour news cycle is now a 15-minute cycle.
-Andrea McDonnell, author of “Reading Celebrity Gossip Magazines.”
In the early 2000s, celebrity gossip was more omnipresent, which caused the public to care more, according to McDonnell. It was hard to walk into a grocery store or turn on a television without seeing some headlines about "Bennifer" at their peak.
“Now, we might have the people that we quite literally choose to follow online, and if it’s not something that we select ourselves or that’s algorithmically driven to us, we might not even see it,” she said.
Social media has allowed fans to believe they have a more intimate relationship with celebrities, according to Sisco King. As a result, the relationship between the public and celebrities “becomes a little friendlier,” she said.
The public began to reassess how celebrities were treated in the early aughts and criticized the way celebrities’ lives were consumed as entertainment.
Celebrities also increasingly began connecting directly with fans, which gave them more control over what they shared with the public — and how they did it.
Lopez seized the opportunity to reclaim her love story with Affleck. In the second era of their romance, she documented their courtship in her fan newsletter, On the J Lo, where she also announced details about their July 2022 wedding in Las Vegas.
But even with the shift in how the public consumes celebrity news, "Bennifer" continued to generate some scrutiny online. While some fans were rooting for their second chance at romance, others analyzed and dissected the couple's relationship on social media.
In February, when Lopez released her album and accompanying movie “This is Me… Now,” she also gave fans a behind-the-scenes look at her relationship through a documentary titled “The Greatest Love Story Never Told.”
Many quickly speculated that there was conflict between the couple, because Affleck seemed uncomfortable with publicizing certain parts of his romance with Lopez.
“Things that are private, I had always felt, are sacred and special because in part they’re private,” Affleck said in the documentary. “So, this was something of an adjustment for me.”
Lopez acknowledged Affleck’s reservations in the documentary, saying, “I don’t think he’s very comfortable with me doing all of this. But he loves me, he knows I’m an artist and he’s going to support me in every way he can because he knows he can’t stop me from making the music I made and writing the words that I wrote.”
In this case, Lopez’s efforts to control the narrative didn’t appear to go as planned, according to Sisco King.
“People had been really wanting the intimate access, wanting the behind-the-scenes, backstage stories, but this was too much,” she said. “There were aspects, particularly in the documentary, where people could perceive something like discomfort in Affleck’s words and demeanor on screen, and it just gave them more opportunities to read into the situation and to take a critical stance on it.”
Rumors began to circulate in May that the couple had split. Tabloids reported that the two hadn’t been seen together in weeks and were living separately.
By the time the "Bennifer" breakup became official this week, the news — to many spectators — already felt old.
