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Kelly Rissman
US News Reporter
An old interview with Ben Affleck has resurfaced in which he explained why he thinks his relationships ended.
In 1999, before marrying Jennifer Garner and Jennifer Lopez, Playboy She asked the actor if any of his ex-girlfriends were “mad at him in general” and his answer was “mostly, yes.”
“Probably rightly so. If I were the next guy to date them, I’m sure I’d nod my head in agreement about what a jerk their ex-boyfriend was,” he said. Missing girl The actor told the magazine after being asked to explain why his past partners were probably upset with him.
“It’s not that he was a womanizer or physically or psychologically abusive or whatever. It’s just that these relationships never end well.”
He explained that his biggest problem stems from a lack of communication and how he repeats the cycle of not telling his girlfriends when something is bothering him until he can't stand it anymore, which ends the entire relationship.
“Over the course of a relationship, if you feel dissatisfied and unhappy and you don’t say anything, if you don’t address it at that moment, it just festers and stays there. So instead of saying, ‘Look, don’t do that, please don’t act this way,’ I accept it until I just don’t want to be in the relationship at all,” she said.
“Then I cause some incident or do something or just don’t call her. And then she gets upset. And I can’t necessarily blame her at that point because I’ve developed such passive-aggressive anger that I don’t feel compassion and I say, ‘Well, of course I didn’t call you. If you weren’t such a nagging, grumpy harpy, I would call you. ’ But I hope that’s something she’s getting over.”
In the years following the interview, Affleck was engaged to Lopez before calling it off in 2002. He then married Garner in 2005 and they had three children together: Violet Anne, 18, Seraphina Rose, 15, and Samuel, 12.
The former couple split ten years later in 2015 before officially divorcing in 2018. At the time, many people criticized Affleck after he partially blamed his marriage to Garner for his struggles with alcoholism when speaking on The Howard Stern Show in 2021.
“We had a marriage that didn’t work out,” Affleck told Stern at the time. “This happens. This was someone I love and respect, but I shouldn’t be married to anymore… what I did was… [I] “I drank a bottle of whiskey and fell asleep on the couch, which turned out not to be the solution.”
“Part of the reason I started drinking alcohol was because I felt trapped,” he added, though Affleck later clarified in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that his behavior was “his responsibility.”
In late August, after being married to the “Jenny from the Block” singer for just over two years, she filed for divorce. Neither of them has said anything about the reasons for the divorce, although the date of separation was listed as April 26.
