In August, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck held their second wedding ceremony this summer on Affleck’s estate in Georgia. It was a big affair and one with a role for everyone: the couple had their children give them away to honor their blended family during their nuptials.
Lopez shares her 14-year-old twins Emme and Maximilian with ex-husband Marc Anthony. Affleck shares his three children with his ex-wife Jennifer Garner, Violet, 16, Seraphina, 13, and Samuel, 10. Lopez wrote about the special moment in her popular newsletter On The JLo. She explained that she had musical artist Marc Cohn make a surprise appearance to perform his song “True Companion,” because they’d agreed it was a “perfect wedding love song” when they were first together two decades ago.
“As I walked down the aisle, the first song he played wasn’t ‘True Companion’ however,” she wrote. “It was his ‘The Things We’ve Handed Down’ — a song about the wonderful mystery of children — something we could only guess at back then, but it was the perfect choice as our five children preceded me on the walk.”
She continued, “The twenty years between those dreams of youth and the adult world of love and family we embraced that day, brought more to this marriage than either of us ever could have imagined. We weren’t only marrying one another; we were marrying these children into a new family. They were the only people we asked to stand up for us in our wedding party. To our great honor and joy, each one did.”
The couple is often seen together with their children. After their first wedding in Las Vegas, the newlyweds jetted off to Paris for a honeymoon and work trip for Lopez, and their kids went on the journey, too.
Aimée Lutkin is the weekend editor at ELLE.com. Her writing has appeared in Jezebel, Glamour, Marie Claire and more. Her first book, The Lonely Hunter, will be released by Dial Press in February 2022.
