Why Bennifer’s Built to Last: Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck Picked Up Where They Left Off, Only Better

And oh, the lessons that each of them have learned—about love, fidelity, family and, perhaps most importantly, themselves.

Lopez told Vanity Fair, talking about her third marriage, but also the road that led to it, “Things just happen, and you’re in the middle of it and you just try to navigate your way through it being a good person. Doing the best you can. Trying to learn from the ups and downs. When it comes to love and relationships, what I’ve learned now is that the the most important relationship is with myself. And it took me a long time to get to that place. But I finally feel that I understand that. It wasn’t anyone else’s fault, but I couldn’t be right in any relationship until I got more in touch with who I was, and what I needed and what I wanted.

“And getting to that place for me has been the real journey, the real task,” Lopez continued, “where I realize that the main relationship I needed to have and the real love had to be with myself.”

Still, even now with another decade of experience under her belt, the “Love Don’t Cost a Thing” singer is risking a lot in returning to a scene that previously resulted in sorrow, her “first real heartbreak,” she said on Today in 2014.

But if anyone has done some work on himself over the years, it’s Ben Affleck.