Jennifer Lopez is getting candid about love, loss, and the hard-won lessons in between. During a recent show at her Las Vegas residency, the singer and actress opened up about the emotional toll of her 2014 divorce from Marc Anthony — the father of her 18-year-old twins, Max and Emme — after a decade of marriage. She eased into the topic with characteristic self-awareness, quipping to the crowd:
“After my third divorce, that’s when I really started getting good at it.” She caught herself quickly. “Seriously, that’s not funny,” she added, before acknowledging that the period was “actually a really tough time. I was really about to give up on it all,” Lopez admitted. “I mean, I was a single mom with two 3-year-old twins.” It was in that low moment that she turned to a mentor — the late self-help author Louise Hay — whose advice ended up reframing everything.
As Lopez recounted it, Hay asked her: “Jennifer, you’re a dancer, right? When you’re learning a dance and you get the steps wrong, what do you do?” Lopez’s answer was instinctive: she keeps going until she gets them right. “That’s right,” Hay told her. “Always keep dancing.”
“After my third divorce, that’s when I really started getting good at it,” Lopez initially joked during her recent Las Vegas residency show.
“Seriously, that’s not funny,” the Grammy nominee continued, before explaining that “it was actually a really tough time.”
“I was really about to give up on it all. I mean, I was a single mom with two 3-year-old twins and I called up one of my mentors,” JLo added.
“Her name was Louise Hay. Some of you might know who she was. She passed away.”
The residency also gave Lopez a platform to dispense some relationship wisdom of her own — this time directed at the men in the room.
“All women need is kindness and love,” she told the audience. “We need very little. You give us a little bit of sugar, sweetness, kindness — and we will give you so much in return.” She was equally pointed about what women don’t need. “It’s not about the money. I don’t want your stuff,” she said, adding with a laugh that people see her sparkly microphone and assume she comes with a high price tag — and that they wouldn’t necessarily be wrong.
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Lopez’s reflections on love carry the weight of a complicated romantic history. She married Cuban actor Ojani Noa in 1997, divorcing less than a year later. Her second marriage, to dancer Cris Judd in 2001, lasted just nine months. Her relationship with Ben Affleck — which captivated the public when it began in 2002 and ended in a broken engagement in 2004 — seemed to find its conclusion when the two rekindled things in 2021 and married in 2022, only for Lopez to file for divorce in August 2024.
Through it all, she has maintained a publicly optimistic stance on love — even as the reality has proven far more complicated. The dance metaphor, it seems, is one she keeps returning to: not because the steps have always gone right, but because she hasn’t stopped moving.