An old Ben Affleck interview has resurfaced… And it doesn’t exactly paint him in the best light amid his split from Jennifer Lopez.
As the Gigli co-stars’ divorce drama continues to barrel forward, a 25-year-old interview has resurfaced and we just have one question: has he not evolved?! And if not, why the heck not?! Because while chatting with Playboy in 1999, Ben very candidly talked about how the ends of his relationships were always bitter and messy, and… Talk about history repeating!
Related: Katy Perry Finally Reveals Why She & Orlando Bloom Broke Up For That Year
Ben was asked if his “other former girlfriends [are] generally pissed off” at him. And at the time, the Good Will Hunting star responded:
“Mostly, yeah.”
Though he admitted:
“Probably justifiably so. If I were the next guy to go out with them I’m sure I would be nodding in agreement about what an a**hole their ex-boyfriend was.”
Wow! Great that he’s aware of it, but… how is it still happening a quarter century later then??
He made sure to clarify he wasn’t “a womanizer or physically abusive or psychologically abusive or whatever.” Instead he just figured “these relationships never end well.” He reflected:
“I think what happens is, I end up wanting to be out of the relationship. During the course of a relationship, if you get dissatisfied and unhappy and don’t say something, if you don’t deal with it right then, it just festers and stays there. So instead of saying, ‘Look, don’t do that, please don’t act this way,’ I go along with it until I just don’t want to be in the relationship at all. Then I create some incident or do something or just don’t call. And then she’s pissed.”
OK, wait… WHAT?!? He sounds like he thinks this is a valid breakup method! But all you’re doing is avoiding doing the work — you know, the “best kind of work,” Ben? And frankly this quick exit strategy sounds exactly like what we’ve heard Ben did to J.Lo this year! A source said just this week that he essentially ghosted her, moving his stuff out while she was filming on location and then not answering her calls for a while! We mean… come on!
And the no calling thing fits perfectly as he continued:
“And I can’t necessarily blame her at that point since I’ve developed such a passive-aggressive rage that I have no sympathy and tell her, ‘Well of course I didn’t call you. If you weren’t such a nagging, shrewish harpy I’d call you.’”
WTF! That’s so cold! And to think that he was THIS self-aware 25 years ago, but has managed to pretty much continue the same cycle… Sorry, but that’s just toxic behavior!
Ironically, he left off on a hopeful note at the time:
“But that hopefully is something I’m growing out of.”
Well, we have news for 1999 Ben…
As we’ve covered, the Argo director convinced J.Lo into rekindling their romance and going through with their two-decades old wedding plans. But once the reality set in of her level of fame and life in the public eye, he reportedly started to retract from the relationship. But he didn’t even give Jen a clean break… He instead ghosted her and waited for HER to file for divorce! A source said it was so she “wouldn’t look like the villain.” But with the context of this decades-old interview, it kinda sounds like an excuse to hide behind the same “passive-aggressive” behavior he acknowledged way back in 1999!
On Reddit, fans were quick to make their opinions on the resurfaced interview known:
“Classic ‘avoider of conflict’ type person. Also s**t communicator.”
“This is a great example of why self-awareness as a trait is meaningless on it’s own, if you don’t have the emotional maturity to actually do something about the pattern you keep finding yourself in. This man figured it out more than 2 decades ago and then decided to keep inflicting himself on his partners hoping they’d fix him somehow.”
“And that’s also so incredibly confusing for their partner. At first, you THINK you’ve met this incredibly insightful, emotionally literate, self-aware, striving-to-be-better human…but really you have a dude (gender neutral) who gets off harder on talking about their own problems and process and the fantasy fixes than they do actually fixing the f**king leaks.”
“Honestly, that was pretty insightful of him to say at the time. Most people aren’t even capable of truly identifying their issues… but this mother f**ker identified his issues, claimed responsibility for his s**tty actions, and obviously knew what not to do in the future… Yet he clearly hasn’t learned anything in 25 years. Why is that?”
“This is what a lot of people have said…he’s great at the chase and the lovey-dovey beginning of the relationship but gets bored once that’s over and the real relationship that requires effort begins and he nopes on out of there”
YIKES! All we have to say is poor J.Lo!
What are your thoughts here, Perezcious readers?? Let us know in the comments down below.
[Images via Axel Grousset/MEGA/WENN]
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