Jennifer Lopez served as a presenter at tonight’s Grammys Awards, and her husband Ben Affleck joined her to take in the show as her date. Lopez presented early on in the ceremony, appearing on stage in a navy dress with a plunging neckline and thigh-high leg slit. Affleck was photographed next to her in the audience, wearing a suit.
Lopez isn’t nominated for a Grammy this year, but with her project This Is Me… Now scheduled to be released in 2023, that could change soon.
In November, Lopez spoke about how she struggled singing songs about Affleck from her first album, This Is Me… Then (2002), because their first breakup was so hard on her.
“Once we called off that wedding 20 years ago, it was the biggest heartbreak of my life,” she told Apple Music 1 of their September 2003 decision to not go through with the ceremony, which they announced one day before the wedding date. The two ultimately broke up in January 2004 before reconciling in spring 2021. They got married in summer 2022.
“I honestly felt like I was going to die. It sent me on a spiral for the next 18 years where I just couldn’t get it right,” she continued. “But now, 20 years later, it does have a happy ending. It has the most would-never-happen-in-Hollywood ending. ‘That would never happen. We’re not going to write that because nobody would believe it’ ending. It’s funny because when me and Ben got back together, he was like, ‘You never performed the songs [from This Is Me… Then]. You never did ‘I’m Glad.’ You never did this. You never did that.’ I was like, ‘You’re right. It was painful.’ It was a part of me then that I had to put away to move on and survive. It was a survival tactic, for sure.”
Senior News and Strategy Editor
Alyssa Bailey is the senior news and strategy editor at ELLE.com, where she oversees coverage of celebrities and royals (particularly Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton). She previously held positions at InStyle and Cosmopolitan. When she’s not working, she loves running around Central Park, making people take #ootd pics of her, and exploring New York City.