Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez

IMAGE: AP IMAGES.

Since their breakup, fans have wondered why Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner’s divorced and caused the end of their marriage of 13 years.

Affleck and Garner met in 2000 on the set of the movie Pearl Harbor. (Garner was married to actor Scott Foley at the time.) Affleck and Garner reunited in 2002 on the set of Daredevil, in which they played love interests Daredevil (Matt Murdock) and Elektra Natchios. “We met on Pearl Harbor, which people hate, but we fell in love on Daredevil,” Affleck told Playboy in 2017. “By the way, she won most of the fights in the movie, which was a pretty good predictor of what would happen down the road—my wife, holding swords and beating the living shit out of me.”

Less than a year after the premiere of Daredevil, Affleck got engaged to Jennifer Lopez. In 2003, Garner announced her separation from Foley and filed for divorce later year. Months later, Affleck announced that he and Lopez had decided to end their engagement. In 2004, news broke that Affleck and Garner were dating. The couple married in 2005 and welcomed their first child together, a daughter named Violet, that December. Their second child, a daughter named Seraphina, was born in 2009 followed by their third child, a son named Samuel, in 2012.

In 2015, Affleck and Garner announced their separation. “After much thought and careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to divorce. We go forward with love and friendship for one another and a commitment to co-parenting our children whose privacy we ask to be respected during this difficult time. This will be our only comment on this private, family matter. Thank you for understanding,” the former couple said in a statement at the time. The two filed for divorce in 2017 before finalizing their split a year later. So why did Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner divorce? Read on for the reason Affleck gave for why his marriage to Garner ended.

Why did Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner divorce?

Ben Affleck, Jennifer GarnerIMAGE: JOHN SHEARER/INVISION/AP.
Why did Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner divorce? In an interview on The Howard Stern Show in 2021, Affleck revealed that he and Garner broke up because they simply “grew apart.” “The truth was, we took our time, we made a decision, we grew apart. We had a marriage that did not work. This happens,” he said. “It is somebody I love and respect, but to whom I should not be married any longer.” He continued, “And then we said, ‘You know what? We tried. We tried, because we had kids.’ And then both of us felt like, ‘We don’t want this to be the model that our kids see of marriage.’”

Affleck told Stern that he and Garner “would have ended up at each other’s throats” had they not ended their relationship. He also believed that he “would probably still be drinking” if their marriage continued. “That was part of why I started drinking alcohol, I was trapped,” he said.  “I was like, ‘I can’t leave because of my kids, but I am not happy. What do I do?’ What I did was drink a bottle of scotch on the couch, which turned out not to be the solution.”

Affleck clarified his statement two years later in a March 2023 profile in The Hollywood Reporter. He told the outlet that his current wife Jennifer Lopez helped him with the profile interview to not encounter any hiccups that could come up. “In fact, she gave me a talk this morning before this interview. She thinks that because of experiences that I’ve had, I’ve become very guarded. And she’s right. I view these things as land mines, where if you say one wrong thing, your career might be over. I had a really painful experience where I did an interview where I was really vulnerable, and the entire pickup was something that was not only not right, it was actually the opposite of what I meant.”