When, this spring, Jennifer Lopez split from her fiancé, erstwhile Bronx bomber Alex Rodriguez, and wound up with her former fiancé, big ball of gorgeous existential dread Ben Affleck, a rift in the gossip-sphere opened up, and in it poured photographers, anonymous sources, his dad, her mom, a couple coasts, and so many exes.
On the Page Six Masters Dating Circuit, there are apparently only 10 people available and they’re all selling each other real estate like you and I Venmo each other for lunchtime burritos.
Of course the tale starts well before all that…way back at the turn of the century, when a famous man fell in love with a triple threat and vice versa, but too much attention got in the way.
The concept of this InStyle profile on Jennifer Lopez was basically an oral history of Jennifer Lopez’s life—many of her friends, exes, and colleagues weigh in.
Now, at the time, I thought this was best understood as guerrilla marketing for Lopez’s recently launched beauty brand.
May 28: J.Lo grabs a meal with Marc Anthony, whom she married after breaking her engagement to Affleck back in 2004, in Miami after Affleck flew back to California.
May 29: Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle brand, Goop, posts a meme on the company Instagram featuring her with Ben Affleck.
June 11: Marc Anthony appears in In the Heights, a movie based on a Lin-Manuel Miranda musical.
June 14, more importantly: A kiss, we have a kiss! Lopez and Affleck have been seen together several times now, and yet here is the first publicly spotted lip-lock.
And then a kid comes up and shows them a video or something on his phone, and they both pause their embrace and look at it politely for like 40 seconds.
June 19: Time is bending toward the longest day of the year, when the sun lingers against the sky like two old lovers over a bottle of wine.
June 22: The Daily Mail discovers that the Hamptons house A-Rod is living in—the one that is near J.Lo’s home in Water Mill—is none other than the manse that Donald Trump Jr.
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