Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck are so OVER! After ramming their insufferable ‘love story’ down our throats, MAUREEN CALLAHAN says this talentless, narcissistic duo were doomed from the start

This imminent divorce couldn’t happen to a more deserving, insufferable couple.

Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez — who have been ramming their all-consuming, ultra-special ‘love story’ down our collective throats for the past two years and the better part of the early aughts — are on the verge of breaking up again.

Stevie Wonder saw this coming. Everyone saw this coming — except, it seems, Ben and J.Lo.

‘Everybody thought I was crazy,’ Lopez told Variety just three months ago. ‘And by the way, I thought I was crazy.’

She wasn’t discussing this new marriage, her fourth, or her insistence on being taken seriously as a singer who can’t sing, or her determination to mount a concert tour that was only ever doomed to fail – as it now has, cancelled last week in another humiliation.

Nope: She was talking about her multimedia tribute to Affleck and their love, in album form, movie musical form and an accompanying $20 million self-financed documentary, a vision that Hollywood execs just couldn’t understand and wouldn’t support.

‘Prince did it with “Purple Rain”,’ she says in the doc.

Is she for real? Prince was a genius, an original, a sui generis artist. Jennifer Lopez is a flat singer who likely owes her career to autotune and her scandalous time with Diddy (which, karmically, may be coming back to bite her).

But that’s the level of delusion in Lopez’s la-la land. Even a warning from her longtime manager, Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas, wasn’t enough to stop her.

‘I was worried,’ Goldsmith-Thomas said about Lopez’s plans. She asked Lopez: ‘Why are you sharing your story? It’s too personal. Stop it.’

Exactly! We got the memo, Jen: You won the downbeat alcoholic gambler who allegedly screwed his children’s nanny behind his then-wife Jennifer Garner’s back (fervently denied, of course), then made Garner stop for fast food on the way to rehab! It’s a love story for the ages! All along, you were The One, you lucky gal!

You can’t sell people what they know is complete BS.

Affleck has been walking around for the better part of a year looking miserable — granted, it’s his default factory setting — slamming car doors with J.Lo in the passenger seat, sitting glumly at the Grammys while she apparently yells at him to ‘look motivated!’, or tolerating terribly awkward kisses from her as if he’s suffering the administration of painful medicine.

J.Lo should have known. When she reunited with Affleck — fresh off her then-fiancé Alex Rodriguez having to deny claims he was caught hitting on a reality TV star, oh the shame! — they told the world they called off their first wedding, scheduled for September 2003, because of media attention.

‘I would say it was about 50 percent [of what destroyed our relationship],’ Affleck told Howard Stern.

The other 50 percent must have been the reports that while filming in Canada, weeks before their wedding — and mere hours after their lovey-dovey ‘Dateline’ interview aired — Affleck had allegedly performed oral sex on a stripper, in a strip club, in front of his co-stars.

By the way, this idea that Affleck is a serious artist who can’t stand publicity or paparazzi, who endures what he must in order to create, is also total garbage.

He spent the better part of the pandemic staging paparazzi strolls with his then-girlfriend Ana de Armas. When they broke up, he made sure photographers got a shot of her life-size cut-out in his trash.

After divorcing Garner in 2018, he essentially blamed her for his alcoholism.

‘I’d probably still be drinking [if we had not divorced],’ Affleck told Stern. ‘Part of why I started drinking alcohol was because I was depressed.’

Classy guy. 

Affleck recently showed up to Tom Brady’s roast, sounding and looking unsteady — yet sources close to him are blaming the famously clean-living Lopez for the impact her ‘lifestyle’ is having on their marriage.

Now he’s roaming around LA, waving his hands so we can all see whether he’s wearing his wedding ring, and currently burning through $100,000 a month on a Brentwood rental.

This is who Ben Affleck is. He’s the guy whose camp is apparently briefing on his total victimhood at the hands of J.Lo, a woman who cannot shut up for a single second about the amazing Ben Affleck.

‘If there was a way to divorce on grounds of temporary insanity, he would,’ a source said last week. ‘He feels like the last two years was just a fever dream, and he’s come to his senses now and understands there is just no way this is going to work.’

Most women, upon their husband humiliating them like this, would be tossing his clothes on the front lawn, changing the locks, losing his number, and speed-dialing the best divorce attorney in town.

Not our J.Lo. She is clinging on for dear life, looking down the barrel of a fourth divorce, the commercial and critical flops that were the Affleck-centric album and attendant films, all that cultural relevance and romance — it’s hard to know which she values more — circling the proverbial drain.

Hey — if these two malignant narcissists can’t make it work, who can?

At least we got some great performance art out of it. Here’s a smattering of what we’ve been subjected to this go-round:

• Two weddings, one a quickie at a Las Vegas chapel, all documented on J.Lo’s Instagram and feeling suspiciously desperate on her part.

• Gluttonous shopping for eight-figure homes on both coasts.

• J.Lo’s tribute album to Ben, ‘This Is Me… Now’, with a song featuring these execrable lyrics: ‘Missing your body/Climbing on top of me/Slippin’ inside of me/Way that I ride it/Bodies aligning/Look at our timing.’ She and Ben both have school-age children.

• Lopez – in her documentary – brandishing a thick binder, given to her by Affleck, that contains all their love letters from 2001 to the present day. This timeline overlaps with Affleck’s marriage to Jennifer Garner, the mother of his three children. Talk about a needlessly cruel cut.

And hasn’t Garner suffered enough?

The key difference here is that people actually rooted for her. She seems decent, likeable, and never commodified her relationship with Affleck.

J.Lo, however… it’s hard to root for someone so limited, talentless and self-centered. Who has been gloating about her happy marriage until she’s not. Who shut down a reporter asking the only question any decent reporter would ask: What’s going on with your marriage?

‘You know better than that,’ J.Lo chided last month.

Who is she kidding? Herself alone, it seems.

Perhaps Ben’s bad behavior will dissuade her to give up fighting for this marriage. Perhaps she might learn something and disappear for a while, then re-emerge with some humility.

Perhaps. But probably not.

Here’s her ostensibly adoring husband in her documentary talking about how he sees her: As a bottomless pit of need!

No amount of love, he tells us, or success or fame or wealth will ever make her happy.

Physician, heal thyself.

‘In Jennifer’s case,’ he says, ‘I don’t think there’s enough followers or movies or records or any of that stuff to fill that part of you that feels that longing, that pain. Ultimately, that’s the work you’ve got to do on your own.’

Lucky for her that Affleck appears to be freeing her to try.

And lucky for us — we won’t have to hear about The World’s Greatest Love Story ever again!