Jennifer Lopez Says 'PTSD' Led To Her Last-Minute Las Vegas Wedding To Ben Affleck
“Twenty years ago, we were supposed to get married, and it kind of all fell apart back then,” she told Jimmy Kimmel.
Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck didn't make the decision to get married in Las Vegas until hours before the ceremony, the singer revealed in a new interview—and their 2003 wedding attempt had a lot to do with it.
Lopez made an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to talk about her new movie, Shotgun Wedding. During the interview, she spoke of her own two-part wedding to Affleck, admitting that planning it became "so stressful." The circumstances, she said, almost began to remind her of her and Affleck's first wedding planning experience 20 years ago, when the then-engaged pair ended up not walking down the aisle because the outside pressure made it seem impossible.
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"Twenty years ago, we were supposed to get married, and it kind of all fell apart back then," she said. "And this time, I absolutely had a little PTSD. I was like, 'Is this happening? Is this really happening?' And we were so happy, and of course, it was happening, but I just felt the wedding was so stressful."
This time around, Lopez said she and Affleck had planned to marry just once, at the actor's estate in Riceboro, Georgia, near Savannah, but it was beginning to look difficult because of the extreme press attention and paparazzi. Their teams suggested they consider Italy instead, but Lopez wanted to have the ceremony in the United States, where they both live. So, she said, Affleck suggested one day that they just run off to Vegas and be done with it.
"We hung up the phone and I was like, 'This is crazy. What are we doing?'" Lopez recalled. "Ben just says, 'F**k it, let's just go to Vegas and get married tonight.'"
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Lopez said she had a rehearsal scheduled for that day, so Affleck made sure to plan around it.
"He was like, 'Go to rehearsal. When you get back here, I'm going to have everything all set up. Three of our kids were at camp, two of them were with us, and he was like, 'They're going to be our witnesses. Let's go. We're doing it tonight.' And we did," she said.
Lopez and Affleck got engaged in April 2022 and married in a private Vegas wedding on the weekend of July 16. They married again in a lavish ceremony in Georgia in August.
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Lopez told Kimmel she remembers waiting in line at the county clerk's office with Affleck, just before midnight in Vegas, to get their wedding certificate.
"Everybody was chill. They weren't freaking out or anything," she recalled. "They were talking to us. They were like, 'Hey, what are you doing here?' We were like, 'We're getting married!'"
This article originally appeared on Harper's BAZAAR US.