BWe all have the Slide for twothe kind of relationship where high drama is confused with passionate love, and both partners are left in a limbo state where they can neither function together nor apart. Some of us may have even experienced this particular romantic phenomenon more directly.
But as the world still comes to terms with the shocking news that Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez (aka Bennifer) are divorcing after two years of marriage, which came two decades after they called off their first engagement, perhaps it’s a good time to ask ourselves what drives people to return to a failed relationship – to return to the place of crying, so to speak.
Relationship counselor Nicola Foster believes the desire to wrap up “unfinished business” is a deep-rooted human instinct.
“There is a tenacity within us that tells us that maybe this time will be different, that the burning need that was not met before might somehow be met this time,” she says.
Hope almost always triumphs over expectations – but romantics place a lot of value on hope. More realistically, it’s the drama, the action, the intense feelings that bring lovers back, even if they’re usually dark. Other relationships can seem lukewarm and boring compared to a relationship where you always make up after a breakup.
“One of the reasons I became a relationship therapist,” says Foster, “was because I was fascinated by a dramatic idea of romance. I loved novels like Anna Karenina And Madame Bovary.”
In both 19th-century classics, the married heroines embark on fateful love affairs that end in tragedy. Foster says she was fascinated by the idea of a love in which the perfect prince would meet her needs. The problem, she realized, was not only that there was no such prince, but that she had to take care of those needs herself.
Another problem is that self-improvement, like improving a relationship, takes work, and work is not a word we associate with love. In fact, we tend to think of love as an escape from work, a liberating place of truth and beauty. As Lopez put it after her 2022 wedding to Affleck in Las Vegas, “Love is beautiful. Love is kind. And it turns out love is patient.”
Love, it now seems, was much more patient when the two were estranged than when they got back together. You can sustain a fantasy about someone when they’re not around, but that’s almost impossible when you live with them, eat with them, and share bathrooms. OK, Hollywood superstars almost certainly have separate bathrooms, but the point is that unrealistic yearnings can’t stand up to too much banal familiarity.
Affleck and Lopez are certainly not the first couple to rekindle a romance that previously didn’t work out, although it’s hard to imagine anyone who has ever looked more unhappy doing so. The long faces may have had a lot to do with unwanted paparazzi attention, but celebrity watchers of the so-called Bennifer 2.0 have long maintained that it was a marriage of two people whose mutual attraction far outweighed their compatibility.
In this respect, they are reminiscent of an even more famous and stormy couple: Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who married and divorced twice and lived their lives in an operatic emotional state that oscillated between grand gestures of devotion and pathetic displays of despair.
It was an explosive romance, fuelled by copious amounts of alcohol and the glare of celebrity, but the underlying dynamic, says Foster, is a normal one. “There’s one person, Taylor, who wants more and is seeking validation, and the other, Burton, feels validated by this role but still wants to step back and gain more autonomy.”
It was a union that had everything except stability. They began an affair on the set of Cleopatra 1963, a bloated epic that itself depicts the passionate but volatile relationship between the eponymous queen and the Roman general Mark Antony. Burton and Taylor arguably reached their cinematic peak in Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?a film about a married couple who loathe each other and yet are completely dependent on each other. According to their biographer Roger Lewis, it was “their entire marriage crammed into a single picture”.
after newsletter campaign
When the marriage inevitably collapsed in 1974, they remarried the following year and divorced again the year after that, each continuing to refer to the other as the love of their life. Were they as susceptible to the romantic mythology of their relationship as their adoring fans?
Experts tend to look to childhood for the cause of recurring behavioral problems. In the case of Taylor, a child star, and Burton, one of 13 children born to an alcoholic father and a mother who died when the future movie star was just two years old, there were plenty of warning signs.
“These types of relationships often conform to attachment theory and fear of abandonment,” says Simy Jewell, a psychotherapist who counsels couples. “In my experience, the romantic pattern starts early and repeats itself. It could be the first dramatic relationship in college that becomes the model for what comes later.”
Of course, there is another, rather disturbing possibility. The reason why some couples cannot get over a breakup is because deep down they really Are They are meant for each other and if they could just put aside their minor differences, heavenly bliss with their soul mate awaits them.
Neither Jewell nor Foster definitively rule out this possibility, but they have not seen much evidence of it in their counseling rooms. Couples may successfully reunite, says Foster, but only if they are willing to address their issues. “Differences are healthy – there needs to be some back and forth – but they need to be acknowledged.”
Maybe Affleck and Lopez were meant to be together, but never fully understood what that meant. Surely only a cold-hearted pragmatist would disregard Bennifer 3.0.
