“The Greatest Love Story Never Told” Embraces Self-Love

If you had a tough time understanding Jennifer Lopez’s latest music video venture “This Is Me… Now: A Love Story,” her documentary “The Greatest Love Story Never Told” would possibly reply a few of your questions. In the doc, Lopez shares that the inspiration behind each “This Is Me… Now: A Love Story” and her ninth studio album, “This Is Me… Now” (each of which launched on Feb. 16), was to lastly set the document straight about her love life.

“I’ve been married four times now. I’m sure people watching from the outside were like, ‘What is this girl’s fucking problem?’ You saw kind of a compulsive behavior,” Lopez says within the documentary’s introduction. “What I portrayed to the world was, ‘Oh this didn’t work out and it’s fine and I’m good and they’re good.’ And all of that was kind of bullshit.”

The documentary goes behind the scenes within the making of each the movie and the album, and Lopez additionally walks viewers down the final twenty years of her private life. She admits all these back-to-back marriages and relationships had been a results of not being good with herself.

“I didn’t think much of myself. So the world didn’t think much of me. That lined up,” she says in tears.

She additionally reveals that a part of the inspiration behind her self-financed multimedia venture was getting again with the love of her life and now-husband, Ben Affleck, who seems in each the musical (as an incognito character) and the documentary. Lopez shares that she was fully devastated after their 2004 breakup as a result of she felt like she did not simply lose the love of her life but in addition the very best buddy she’d ever had. The public scrutiny that adopted solely made issues worse.

Similarly to the musical movie, the documentary touches on Lopez’s love life for the previous 20 years, the explanation she was in fixed seek for love, and her love story with Affleck. But extra importantly, it highlights her self-love journey and explores why it took her so lengthy to get to a greater relationship with herself.

“‘This Is Me… Now’ is about truth and facing the truth of who you really are and embracing that, and the truth is I’m not the same as I was 20 years ago,” she says.

In the documentary, Lopez shares how being the center youngster made her continually really feel a necessity to indicate her dad and mom and household that she had worth and value. She felt ignored by her dad, who was at all times working, and her mother, whom she claims was at all times the focus. Feeling emotionally uncared for compelled her to grow to be hardworking and disciplined, she says, and someplace down the road she began in search of the love she did not really feel she acquired rising up from males.

At first, it was laborious for me to consider that Lopez is not the identical particular person she was 20 years in the past — no less than with regards to her love life and her have to continually be in a romantic relationship. When have we ever seen her single? Very shortly after her breakup with baseball star Alex Rodriguez in 2021, she was already being publicly seen with Affleck. Can somebody actually recover from their worry of being alone and their have to continually be in partnership with out ever taking a major break from relationship? I’d argue no. But within the doc, Lopez admits there was a interval when she did lastly embrace singlehood.

In the musical, there is a scene the place Fat Joe, who performs her fictional therapist, asks her if she has “ever considered being alone for a minute.” Her incognito character begins to interrupt down in tears. Lopez admits within the documentary that the scene with Fat Joe parallels an precise dialog she had with a therapist.

“I used to be terrified to be alone,” Lopez shares. “I didn’t know what I was going to do by myself. Who was going to take care of me? Who was going to protect me? This one therapist said to me, ‘Can you be alone?’ And I was like, ‘I can do it. I can be alone. I can be alone. I’ll be alone until Christmas.'”

Lopez’s therapist urged she erase everybody from her telephone who would possibly pose temptation. According to Lopez, she listened and took some vital time to be alone and deal with no matter it was she wanted to heal — like feeling emotionally deserted as a baby.

It’s been simple for some followers to dismiss Lopez’s latest tasks — the movie, the album, and the doc — as foolish or pointless. But I could not assist however empathize along with her after having extra perception into her journey and the issues she’s struggled with with regards to love and relationships. I now consider Lopez when she says she took the time to be alone and heal — at any time when that was.

Ultimately, it is clear that investing $20 million on this venture was for herself, not for followers or viewers. Documenting her personal journey was extra a therapeutic act of self-love than the rest. Lopez possible did not put out these tasks to be nominated for awards or as a result of she believes they’re going to be main hits; she put them out as a result of they had been the ultimate course of in her therapeutic journey.

If these tasks do something, I hope they encourage viewers fighting self-worth to take the time to replicate, heal, and provides themselves the self-love they’ve at all times deserved. Because on the finish of the day, the one love that we will assure on this life is the love we can provide ourselves.