The couple’s recent 47-day break from the spotlight added fuel to the speculation fires. After that, rumours circulated that Affleck had moved out of their family home, which only served to fuel fan speculation about the true situation.
According to reports this week, Lopez has reportedly resorted to Jennifer Garner, an actress who was Affleck’s spouse from 2005 to 2018, because she believes Garner is “one of the only people in the world who would understand what she is going through.”
“[Garner] has been through it with the same man herself and although the circumstances were quite different… they both dealt with some of the same issues.” a source told the Daily Mail.
View this post on Instagram
Following their breakup in 2018, the 52-year-old actress started dating businessman John Miller. Despite having moved on from her ex-husband emotionally, she still wants to keep her marriage together because she sees Lopez as a stable figure in his life.
The aforementioned source told the Daily Mail, “Jen does not want Ben to pull the plug on this marriage because she really does care about JLo.” In order to try to keep the two of them together, Garner “did go to his house to talk to him about this and to try and keep the two of them together,” they continued.
View this post on Instagram
“JLo was told several times by Jen how valued she is in all their lives,” the source added. “She is one of the only women who can get through to Ben and keep him from jumping off the deep end with his addiction.”
In an interview with the New York Times from 2020, Affleck acknowledged that his drinking had made his “marital problems” with Garner worse.
“People with compulsive behavior, and I am one, have this kind of basic discomfort all the time that they’re trying to make go away,” he said at the time. “You’re trying to make yourself feel better with eating or drinking or sex or gambling or shopping or whatever. But that ends up making your life worse. Then you do more of it to make that discomfort go away. Then the real pain starts.”
“It becomes a vicious cycle you can’t break,” he continued. “That’s at least what happened to me.”
Affleck did not attend his wife’s latest film, Atlas, premiere earlier this week.