Amid reports of strain on their marriage, Page Six reported that an unnamed friend of Lopez’s said her rekindled relationship with Affleck was an expensive “exercise in closure” for the singer, who felt she had “unfinished business” with her ex.
A couples therapist who is not treating the couple told Business Insider that the pair made a common mistake that many couples make when trying to move on from a failed relationship.
She said the two didn’t need to rekindle their romance to get closure on their love affair. In fact, they may have repeated patterns from their first relationship if they haven’t examined what went wrong the first time.
Representatives for Lopez and Affleck did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Repeating cycles
Lopez and Affleck’s first romance ended just over 20 years after their second did.
The couple first romantically linked in 2002 after meeting on the set of “Gigli “ and getting engaged the same year. But they broke up in 2004, and both went on to marry, have children, and divorce other people before rekindling their romance in 2021.
In the years after their 2004 split, Lopez repeatedly said that the public pressures of their relationship, particularly from the tabloids, contributed to their breakup. Still, the two kept in touch via email after their romance ended and, evidently, held a place in her heart open for her old flame.
Wedding and couples therapist Landis Bejar, who founded AisleTalk, told BI that a lack of closure from a breakup could impact someone’s romantic life for years.
For instance, if you don’t have closure, you may romanticize the time you spent in a relationship, regardless of what it was actually like.
“Even if you’re clear on why it ended, it’s still possible to look back with rose-colored glasses,” she said. “You’re romanticizing or idealizing that time.”
Bejar said she thinks of closure as having three components:
- Accepting that a relationship has ended
- Clarifying why it ended
- Wanting to move forward
For a romantic relationship ending, moving forward can mean dating other people or feeling content single.
According to Bejar, people often reconnect with an ex if they have not fully accepted that a relationship has ended or sought clarity on why it ended in the first place.
“If you haven’t given it a really honest look of what they did and what you did to contribute to the ending of the relationship, then you will be at risk for recreating those same dynamics,” she added.
Though Lopez said she and Affleck had both independently grown since their first relationship, they may or may not have addressed what led to their breakup when they reconciled.
Lopez told People’s Elizabeth Leonard in February 2022 that her second relationship with Affleck was “very different” from the one they had in the early 2000s.
“It’s beautiful the way it feels very different than it was years ago,” she said. “There’s more of an appreciation and a celebration for it, which is nice.”
She also told the outlet that Affleck had emotionally grown in the years they spent apart, saying, “he is so everything I always knew he was and wanted to be.”
“I feel like he’s at a place in his life where — just like how I feel about myself — it’s been a journey of learning yourself and figuring yourself out, getting to a place where you feel really good on your own and who you are so you can be in a happy, healthy relationship,” she went on to say.
The myth of closure
Bejar also told BI that many people believe in the “myth of closure,” thinking they must speak to their ex or reconnect with them directly before moving on from the relationship.
Popular media often presents closure as a confrontation between two people, but Bejar said people can find closure without speaking to or reconnecting with their former partner.
“Oftentimes, we’re seeking this closure conversation, that post-game breakdown of what happened,” Bejar said. “But that myth of closure is that you need the other person to have a conversation with. The three components that I talked about are all possible through your own personal work, and therapy is an excellent space for that.”
To be clear, despite what Lopez’s friend told Page Six, Lopez nor Affleck have publicly said they found their way back to each other because they didn’t have closure.
Affleck declined to tell The Wall Street Journal’s Michael Hainey how he and Lopez got back together in 2021, but he said they reunited in a way that “reflects not just the person that I want to be, but the person that I really feel like I am—which is not perfect, but somebody who tries very hard and cares very much about being honest and authentic and accountable.”
No matter how they got back together, Lopez and Affleck must find true closure to move forward. If not, they may find themselves in the same cycle in another 20 years.
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