Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck - Part II - What is She Teaching Her Children?

In case you have been asleep for the last week and you missed the big news story – Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck have gotten engaged AGAIN two decades after their first broken engagement. Why should you care? Why do I care? Why should anyone care? Why should it matter to us that two, super-wealthy, self-absorbed, over-indulgent celebrities are engaged again after a 20-year hiatus?

It matters because your children, particularly pre-teens and young teens are reading, watching, and soaking it all in. What your children, but more importantly, Ms. Lopez’s children are gleaning from her lightning-fast falling in and out of “love” and bed-hopping is a skewed, unnatural view of what “love” is. Does Ms. Lopez even know what “love” is? If you don’t want this to be the behavior your children think is normal and emulate in their future liaisons, you need to have an in-depth serious talk with them about love and lasting relationships.

Her children were 3 years old in 2011 when she and their father, Marc Anthony, divorced. What they have been emotionally involved in and witnessed in the succeeding 11 years is their mother, a genuinely multi-talented singer, actor, dancer, and producer, demonstrate by her actions, that her impressive professional accomplishments do not matter to her as much as having a man in her bed to fawn attention onto her ALL. THE. TIME. And she can’t make up her mind who that man should be. Or it doesn’t matter who he is if he provides the attention she requires.

What are Ms. Lopez’s serial engagements and hopping into the next bed with the next man when the sheets on the previous one aren’t even cold, teaching her daughter and son about relationships? About the nature of what she calls “love”?

She professes to “love” the current man she is involved with. She effuses on every social media platform how much she and her “man of the moment’ enjoy each other, have fun together, and lust for one another. Until…..they don’t.

It appears that as soon as the early relationship’s novelty, fervor, and attention to her wane, she loses interest. She seems incapable of advancing to the next level of “love”. The level that requires investment in one another; the level that requires emotional support during boring, routine times, and during times when difficult issues arise.

Real love requires emotional support and commitment when the luster wears off; it requires work to make the other person feel desirable; work to keep the sexual spark alive; work to support each other’s emotional needs, and work to support each other’s dreams.

Worse than allowing her children to witness this lack of commitment is that she has allowed them to become emotionally involved with her current lover (and his children, if he has any). She supposedly fell “in love” with one of her backup dancers, Casper Smart, and invited him to move in with her when her twins were only 3 years old. (That would be the same year as her divorce from Marc Anthony.) They became engaged within 2 years and broke up 3 years later. That’s 5 years of emotional bonding with vulnerable children shattered when she went on to the next man.

Remember the “family” pictures she plastered all over social media of her and Alex Rodriguez’s children when he was her current “engagement”? Entertainment Tonight interviewed her daughter, Emme, joyously sharing information about the new “family’s” bonding.

Then poof. Over. Alex and his children were relegated to the trash heap of discarded lovers and their families. (This article is NOT about what Alex may or may not have done to bring about the split. That is a different subject for a different article.)

Within a week – A WEEK, she was on to the next man, Ben Affleck, whom she had supposedly loved enough to have almost married 20 years previously. What does this speedy switch say about the legitimacy of her “love” for Alex Rodriguez? What does it say about her definition of “love”? While 13-year-old Emme was left sobbing in her father’s arms over the family she lost – the Rodriguez “sisters” she had come to love as her own.

Children are quiet observers of life. They are sponges to what goes on around them. Children live what they know. And they repeat the patterns they lived with, good or bad.

What have Max and Emme been taught about love by the speedy lover swapping they have lived with most of their lives? That love is superficial? That it requires no work because when the luster and initial excitement wear off, you just go on to the next one? That you shouldn’t get too close to anyone because they can be snatched away at any moment? Are Emme and Max going to repeat what they have seen their mother do most of their lives? How will they know to do any different?

Max and Emme are not your responsibility. Your own children are. You can use Ms. Lopez’s flagrant disregard for the meaning of love as a teaching tool. You can explain to them that her behavior is not the norm. You can explain to them what love is and how to sustain it. Or better yet, you can demonstrate it to them in your own relationship with their father.

First published in Medium.com

© Copyright 2022 Joan Gershman