Why does Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez’s divorce feel so sad?

It was genuinely nice seeing two middle-aged stars reunite 18 years after their wedding was called off. But it didn’t last

Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck married in 2022. The couple have since filed for divorce. Picture: Alamy/PA

All Hollywood stars embarking on a romance secretly hope for just one thing: official condemnation from the Vatican. When it emerged that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were having an affair on the set of Cleopatra, the Holy See issued a letter describing Taylor as “an avaricious vamp who destroys families and devours husbands”. (To be fair, she was heading into marriage No 5, with three more to go.) 

When news of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck’s divorce broke today, two years after they married and two decades after they first fell in love, entertainment reporters began invoking Burton and Taylor, another celebrity couple who famously separated and reunited. Baylor – as no one called them – married in 1964, divorced in 1974, remarried in 1975 and divorced again less than a year later.