Jennifer Lopez has taken her new husband’s last name and is surprised at the heat she is taking for doing it.
Lopez did an interview with Vogue in which she responded to The New York Times opinion piece that criticized her for taking Ben Affleck’s last name.
“What? Really?” she said. “People are still going to call me Jennifer Lopez. But my legal name 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.”
She was asked if she would have wanted Affleck to take her last name, and she said 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? I’m very much in control of my own life and destiny and feel empowered as a woman and as a person,” Lopez said.
“I can understand that people have their feelings about it, and that’s okay, too,” she continued. “But if you want to know how I feel about it, I just feel like it’s romantic. It still carries tradition and romance to me, and maybe I’m just that kind of girl.”
Lopez, who is 53, and Affleck, who is 50, got back together last year after she and Alex Rodriguez broke off their engagement. She explained to Vogue how they rekindled their relationship:
“Obviously we weren’t trying to go out in public,” she explained. “But I never shied away from the fact that for me, I always felt like there was a real love there, a true love there. People in my life know that he was a very, very special person in my life. When we reconnected, those feelings for me were still very real.”
The couple shared vows in July in Las Vegas and then had another ceremony in August at Affleck’s estate in Georgia.
Affleck said that even after all this time, he loves Lopez because she’s remained “boundless with love.”
“There is something innately, magically kind and good and full of love at the heart of who Jennifer is,” he told Vogue. “That’s exactly the person I remember from 20 years ago. Maybe she sees all the changes she’s made, whereas when I see her, mostly I just see someone who has retained, against the odds, the thing about her that always made her the most incredible to me: a heart that seems boundless with love. She is my idea of the kind of person I want to be.”
