Jennifer Lopez is looking back on her and Ben Affleck’s wedding day.
Reflecting on their Aug. 20 nuptials via her On the JLo newsletter sent Thursday, Jennifer shared that during their wedding reception, Ben quoted one of her “favorite lines” that he wrote in the 2016 film he directed, Live by Night: “This is heaven. Right here. We’re in it now.”
“I thought… how perfect,” she wrote. She went on to explain the stressors that took place prior to the ceremony including the weather — “it had rained at sunset every day that week” — the “aptly named ‘love bugs,’” worries about whether the guests would arrive on time, a stomach bug that left them “recuperating ’til late in the week” and “a few other unexpected setbacks” which ultimately “had all the makings of a doozie of a wedding weekend.”
“The truth is, I never had one doubt. All week I felt the calm and easy certainty that we were in God’s hands,” she wrote.
Jennifer shared that the wedding day was luckily a sunny one with a “clear blue” sky: “As the sun set behind the live oaks draped in Spanish moss, a warm breeze swept over the lawn where our closest family and friends sat and, at long-last, I started my walk down the stairs that would become the aisle that would lead me toward the rest of my life. Ahhhhh…it was actually happening…”
Jennifer later reflected on how she and Ben had a conversation “more than twenty years ago” about how Marc Cohn’s “True Companion” would make for “the perfect wedding love song.” To Ben’s surprise, Jennifer said she “asked Marc to surprise him by singing it at our wedding and he was lovely and generous to come.” She walked down the aisle to “The Things We’ve Handed Down,” which she described as “the perfect choice as our five children preceded me on the walk.” She added, “The twenty years between those dreams of youth and the adult world of love and family we embraced that day, brought more to this marriage than either of us ever could have imagined. We weren’t only marrying one another; we were marrying these children into a new family.”
“Later Ben told me that the chords of the song and seeing Marc Cohn both shocked him and allowed him to feel the way both roads we had walked found their way, inevitably, inexorably, and perfectly together,” she continued. “And when he saw me appear at the top of the stairs that moment it both made absolute sense while seeming still impossibly hard to believe, like the best dream, where all you want is never to awaken. I would have had many of the same thoughts probably had I not been focusing so hard on not tripping over my dress, but when I got close enough to see his face, it made the same wonderful sense to me. Some old wounds were healed that day and the weight of the past finally lifted off our shoulders. Full-circle — and not at all the way we planned it. Better.”
While sharing a myriad of photos from their rehearsal dinner and reception, Jennifer further reflected on how despite the fact that they both “laughed the night before about getting married again at our age,” for them “this was the perfect timing. Nothing ever felt more right to me, and I knew we were finally ‘settling down’ in a way you can only do when you understand loss and joy and you are battle tested enough to never take the important things for granted or let the silly insignificant nuisances of the day get in the way of embracing every precious moment.”
“Years ago, we had no idea the road ahead would mean navigating so many labyrinths and hold so many surprises, blessings, and delights. It all culminated in this moment, one of the most perfect of our lives,” she concluded. “We couldn’t have been happier. I wish all of you the same kind of happiness…the hard-earned kind that’s all the sweeter for the journey that came before it.”
In July, Jennifer and Ben announced they flew to Vegas to get married. “So with the best witnesses you could ever imagine, a dress from an old movie and a jacket from Ben’s closet, we read our own vows in the little chapel and gave one another the rings we’ll wear for the rest of our lives,” she said at the time. “But in the end, it was the best possible wedding we could have imagined. One we dreamed of long ago and one made real (in the eyes of the state, Las Vegas, a pink convertible and one another) at very, very long last.”
