JLo legally changed her name to “Mrs. Jennifer Lynn Affleck” after they got married.
Jennifer Lopez believes her decision to take Ben Affleck's last name is not just romantic but also a power move. In the December issue of Vogue, the 53-year-old singer laughed when asked whether she'd ever want her 50-year-old husband to take her last name. "No! It's not traditional. It doesn't have any romance to it. It feels like it's a power move, you know what I mean?" Lopez said. "I'm very much in control of my own life and destiny and feel empowered as a woman and as a person."
JLo who legally changed her name to “Mrs. Jennifer Lynn Affleck” admitted while "people are still going to call me Jennifer Lopez," her "legal name" after her wedding to the Argo star "will be Mrs. Affleck because we're joined together."
"We're husband and wife. I'm proud of that. I don't think that's a problem." The Marry Me actress also said she understands “people have their feelings” about wives assuming their husbands’ last names, but according to her it’s a romantic gesture. “It still carries tradition and romance to me, and maybe I’m just that kind of girl.”
.@JLo is opening up about her marriage to @BenAffleck and how they're blending their families together. ❤️ https://t.co/3khVbn3jZj
— Good Morning America (@GMA) November 8, 2022
According to USA Today, this isn't the first time JLo admitted to wanting to change her name. The two first met in 2002, got engaged in 2003, and later called it off and went their separate ways in 2004. While they were engaged briefly JLo declared in a 2003 Dateline special that professionally she was "going to stay with Jennifer Lopez, but my name will be Jennifer Affleck." Lopez who is known to the world as JLo even made a joke about becoming J-Aff, which she said: "doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, but you’ve gotta make sacrifices."
"She's much more traditional than I anticipated she would be," Affleck said during the joint interview. After the first split in 2004, Ben Affleck went on to marry Jennifer Garner from 2005 to 2018, and the two share three children — Violet, 16, Seraphina, 13, and Samuel, 10. Lopez went on to have twins Emme and Maximillian, 14, with her ex-husband Marc Anthony.
"Not to discredit anything in between that happened, because all those things were real too," she shared in her Vogue interview. "All we've ever wanted was to kind of come to a place of peace in our lives where we really felt that type of love that you feel when you're very young and wonder if you can have that again. Does it exist? Is it real? All those questions that I think everyone has. You go through all these relationships, and you're searching and you're connecting and you're disconnecting with people, and you're like, God, is this just what life is? Like a carousel, roller coaster, carnival ride? And then it settles," Lopez said. She added, "But the journey to that is the mystery for everybody."
References:
https://www.vogue.com/article/jennifer-lopez-december-cover-2022-interview
Cover Image Source: Getty Images | Amy Sussman
