Jennifer Lopez Has the Exclusive on Bennifer Wedding

It must be nice having a front-row seat to a life as charmed and luxurious as that of Jennifer Affleck née Lopez’s, especially when you are Jennifer Affleck née Lopez. The multi-hyphenate’s Vegas wedding to her on-again beau Ben Affleck was the celebrity news of the weekend, and the primary source for said news was none other than JAff herself, who shared photos, videos, and a write-up of the nuptials in her On the JLo newsletter.

News outlets broke the news earlier than Lopez did, but Lopez’s take on her own life was the definitive one. She’s just an overachiever like that. Why turn to Us Weekly for an anonymous insider’s bland assessment (“They both are so comfortable with each other and make each other so happy, so they don’t want to wait any longer”) when you can drink the Champagne straight from the platinum tap? Here’s an excerpt from On the JLo:

Last night we flew to Vegas, stood in line for a license with four other couples, all making the same journey to the wedding capital of the world. Behind us two men held hands and held each other. In front of us, a young couple who made the three hour drive from Victorville on their daughter’s second birthday—all of us wanting the same thing— for the world to recognize us as partners and to declare our love to the world through the ancient and nearly universal symbol of marriage.

Lopez wrote that the chapel where they wed stayed open for her wedding (“We barely made it to the little white wedding chapel by midnight”) and that she wore “a dress from an old movie” to the occasion. Her write-up ended like this:

They were right when they said, “all you need is love.” We are so grateful to have that in abundance, a new wonderful family of five amazing children and a life that we have never had more reason to look forward to. Stick around long enough and maybe you’ll find the best moment of your life in a drive through in Las Vegas at twelve thirty in the morning in the tunnel of love drive through, with your kids and the one you’ll spend forever with. Love is a great thing, maybe the best of things—and worth waiting for.

And that’s just sweet, you know? I don’t necessarily trust celebrities to tell their own stories honestly (as, inevitably, these tellings function as PR), but Lopez is so good at it that she makes me want to believe it’s possible. (See also: her recent Halftime documentary, which is just about as good and raw as an authorized docu-vanity project gets.)

Lopez signed her note, “With love, Mrs. Jennifer Lynn Affleck.” Notably, she said in an interview during her first engagement to Affleck in 2003 that she intended on taking his last name: “I think I’m going to stay with Jennifer Lopez, but my name will be Jennifer Affleck, obviously.” It’s probably safe to assume that the “Affleck” will be reserved for her personal life and that, for our purposes, JLo will stay JLo.

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