Bennifer is over – again. But why does Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez’s divorce feel so sad?

All Hollywood stars embarking on a romance secretly hope for just one thing: official condemnation from the Vatican. When it emerged that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were having an affair on the set of Cleopatra, the Holy See issued a letter describing Taylor as “an avaricious vamp who destroys families and devours husbands”. (To be fair, she was heading into marriage No 5, with three more to go.)

When news of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck’s divorce broke today, two years after they married and two decades after they first fell in love, entertainment reporters began invoking Burton and Taylor, another celebrity couple who famously separated and reunited. Baylor – as no one called them – married in 1964, divorced in 1974, remarried in 1975 and divorced again less than a year later. But Bennifer – who were never condemned by a pope, but did earn the first ever celebrity couple portmanteau – were far more normal than Burton and Taylor, who both delighted in publicly playing out their torrid, drunken excess. And that was an undeniable part of Bennifer’s appeal.

Affleck and Lopez first dated between 2002 and 2004. Even at their heights, both of them could sell more magazines than tickets. He wrote a couple of very good films and starred in some very bad ones. She was a curious multi-hyphenate: a singer-dancer-actor with enough star power to drive a career in fluffy romcoms, so-so thrillers and a two-minute Pepsi ad. Both of them were beautiful and inoffensive, and seemed to fear and feed on the attention they got. Like many of our most enduring stars, she is now perhaps most famous for being her, JLO, Jenny from the Block. He is mainly famous now for looking sad.

They almost got married in 2003, but called off the ceremony days before the wedding due to the “excessive media attention”; they dated for four more months before officially calling it quits. But, as the years trotted by, even when they married and divorced other people, they were unfailingly kind about each other. He laid into journalists for treating her as a mistake, the aberration on an Oscar-winner’s career. She blamed the media for the breakup, saying the attention destroyed their relationship “from the inside out” and that she felt “eviscerated” afterwards. When they got back together in 2021, it was as if they’d simply stepped out of the room for a bit. Perhaps some of the pleasure we secretly felt was really relief: we hadn’t ruined a nice thing after all.

In the same way you might be surprised to feel a twinge of sadness at the news of their divorce, their rekindled romance was oddly cheering. We were emerging from the madness of Covid-19, for one thing, which meant all mildly nice news was met with delirious pleasure. These were two people, older and maybe a little wiser, choosing to grant each other a second chance – which is always a miraculous gift, whether you are famous or not.

And there was the eternal sadness of Affleck, who always seemed to move through the world with levels of agony not seen since the great Russian novels, always vaping despondently in his car. After his separation from Jennifer Garner, his wife of 10 years, Affleck got an enormous tattoo of a phoenix on his back, lied that it was fake, then was photographed on the beach two years later, towel around his waist and giant phoenix on his back, staring out at the ocean like a haunted sea captain.

The internet cast him as a sort of universal sad dad, whose melancholy was both real and not real, but always deliciously memeable. So of course it was nice to see that guy land a win, making out with his hot ex-girlfriend at parties. When they got married, in 2022, it was a delightful blend of high and low culture, just like their careers: they married in Las Vegas and honeymooned in Paris.

Not everyone gets eight chances like Taylor, and both Affleck and Lopez were openly grateful for the second. When asked by the Wall Street Journal to spill on his relationship, Affleck replied: “One of the harder lessons that I have learned is that it’s not wise to share everything with the world … I am very lucky in my life in that I have benefited from second chances, and I am aware that other people don’t even get first chances.”

Lopez had more to say, telling People: “We’re older now, we’re smarter, we have more experience, we’re at different places in our lives, we have kids now, and we have to be very conscious of those things. We’re so protective because it is such a beautiful time for all of us.”

When it comes to celebrity marriages, no news is good news. Tabloids began portentously and obsessively documenting instances where they were not wearing wedding rings. Lopez suddenly cancelled her US tour, citing her need to be with her children and family. They were papped looking cranky, or perhaps just bored or hungry. They put their $68m marital home on the market, then got caught house hunting separately. (“The Broker Always Knows the Breakup Is Coming,” one New York Magazine headline read.) In the divorce papers, Lopez has listed their separation date as 26 April, though they were only filed today – on their two-year wedding anniversary, which was deliciously, unsubtly symbolic. Even amid heartbreak, she knows how to put on a show.