HUMOR
To Jennifer Lopez, Superstar Extraordinaire
From a former number-one fan
Actress and singer Jennifer Lopez has been spamming social media with her latest project that I’ve unfollowed her. It’s called This Is Me … Now: A Love Story and no one seems certain what it is. Is it a movie? A music video? A documentary? Even The New York Times is baffled. What is certain is it features Ben Affleck, Lopez’s current husband. That’s hubby number four.
I grew up in the 90s watching Jennifer Lopez rise from the Bronx where she grew up. She debuted her career as a “Fly Girl” dancer on the sketch-comedy TV show In Living Color and catapulted to stardom after her leading role as Mexican singer Selena who was tragically killed by the president of her own fan club.
It’s been a privilege watching Lopez be an unstoppable force for three decades, crossing genres from music, movies, skincare products to alcoholic beverages. At 54, she is an icon for being the hardest-working woman in Hollywood. We won’t argue that. She’s earned her way, and fans can’t stop congratulating her on her success. Indisputably, Lopez is beautiful, dynamic, and an incredibly sexy Latina.
But there is one thing fans are screaming “Enough!” That’s her relentless oversharing when it comes to her love life. The woman spills tea to the hilt. Ostensibly, Lopez loves attention. Fans, however, are tuckered out. Pioneers like me have grown up, moved on. We’re rooting for Lopez to do the same.
Lopez has been married four times with a string of lovers and fiancés in between. There was never a discreet moment about any of them. It’s truly remarkable how much energy she invests bouncing from engagement rings, wedding dresses, to couple interviews. But speaking as a former number-one fan, the novelty is now wearing thin.
Her latest project is a visual declaration to actor, screenwriter, and director Ben Affleck. As much as fans adore them as a power couple, those as old as me — the Generation X who grew up as her cheerleaders — we are finally saying “Enough, woman, enough.”
The cracks are now beginning to show. So are the lines on her face. Lopez is a tough narrative to follow when countless women are still searching for their one true love. It seems ostentatious that Lopez has been given a few too many chances while others are scratching at the bottom of the barrel and coming up empty.
Setting the Hollywood glamor and glitterati aside, Lopez is a serial lover. That’s a red flag the size of a continent. Many have raised concerns calling her toxic with co-dependency issues. Several experts say she projects unresolved childhood traumas that make her allergic to being single for two whole minutes.
It’s not that fans aren’t as enthusiastic about her latest project. Lopez’s world presents a cognitive dissonance with the world where ordinary women live. Our world is messy, sweaty, with chipped manicures from doing housework.
Our world is less stellar. We can’t be fooled by the rocks that she’s got because we don’t have any. We may have a few pieces of zirconia lying around but they’re the price of manufactured glass bottles. In our gritty world, we’re easily out of serums and we forget to remove makeup before bedtime. We’ve runny mascara and badger eyes from poor sleep and cheap eyeliner.
For us mortals standing on solid ground, we too have endured love and heartache, but the realities that come with breakups and make-ups are exhausting, traumatizing, and not a subject for entertainment. We just don’t have it in us to make a music video out of it. Lopez reportedly spent $20 million to produce This Is Me … Now: A Love Story. We’ll just stick to crying in the showers and screaming into our pillows because it’s a whole lot cheaper that way.
This Is Me … Now: A Love Story is clearly a vanity project. What else can it be? Lopez felt a need to produce it because she felt misunderstood by her naysayers. We thought she already explained herself with Netflix’s Halftime. But that was during her “halftime” time with her fiancé, ARod (baseball player Alex Rodriguez). It’s not the same with Affleck, she says. Let’s not forget the movie El Cantante she made with the father of her twins, then-husband Marc Anthony.
With This Is Me Lopez wants to tell her love story from her perspective. At this point, we seriously don’t care and don’t need to know. If Affleck is the one, we’re happy for her to find true love at last. It doesn’t require her to shout it from the rooftop. We hear you loud enough from the giggles in interviews. But that’s what Lopez wants to gamble with with $20 million of her own money. Who are we to rain on her parade?
The last thing a modern woman needs is to watch Lopez gush about the love she had, then lost, reignited, and later reunited and sealed, with Affleck. To the world, he is victim number four, another statistic to Lopez’s body count. Some things are best left screaming inside your head.
I find it all too ironic that Lopez’s new project begins with the assertion This Is Me. To the ordinary woman out there braving the streets trying to make a living, “this is me” is exactly the train ride we’ve been on since elementary years.
In middle school, we joked about falling in love. In high school, we cried over love. Reading Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice, we were made to memorize the infamous quote, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” We weren’t exactly sure what it meant at the time, but the actors chosen to play Fitzwilliam Darcy and Charles Bingley were always good-looking. Thus, we fell for it. So yes, we wanted to get married.
And then we did. We saw cracks in the façade.
Going through the realities of marriage made us realize that Austen was a drunk optimist. The truth was more German philosophy than English literature. Friedrich Nietzsche made more sense when he said, “It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
Marriage isn’t easy, it seems. We were fooled. Yet, we persist, because when it comes to love, we are destined as fools.
Women are hopeful and romantic by disposition. In times of loneliness and melancholy, we turn to prose and poetry. We curl in our beds, soak the pages of The Prophet by Khalil Gibran with our tears. We cling to the dream of possibilities and second chances. We weep softly to Gibran’s soothing lullaby:
“Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”
Indeed alone we are, togetherness we desire. We bloat, get heartburn, and like pigs we perspire.
When that fails, we turn to Netflix and open a bag of chips and biscuits. There remains one true love that never fails us — the love of food that’s bad for us.
Dusting off the crumbs and courage fortified by tubs of ice cream eaten on our quiet bed and six pillows for company, we get up and return to the battlefield of romance, charging towards love and intimacy. Having failed repeatedly, the song on St. Valentine’s radio now plays a different set of lyrics. We tell James Blunt to sod off when he sings “you’re beautiful, you’re beautiful, it’s true.”
Yeah, whatever you twat.
Suddenly, dystopian authors we’ve never been interested in seem appealing. Prose and poetry about love taught in high school seem juvenile, misleading — like guidelines written out of jest. Oh, the mockery! Comedians now made more sense than poets who roamed the deserts in search of water. Greg Behrendt, for one, spoke more sensibly:
“If he’s not calling you, it’s because you are not on his mind. If he creates expectations for you, and then doesn’t follow through on little things, he will do the same for big things. Be aware of this and realize that he’s okay with disappointing you. Don’t be with someone who doesn’t do what they say they’re going to do. If he’s choosing not to make a simple effort that would put you at ease and bring harmony to a recurring fight, then he doesn’t respect your feelings and needs. ‘Busy’ is another word for ‘asshole.’ ‘Asshole’ is another word for the guy you’re dating. You deserve a fucking phone call.”
Now you’ve evolved into a sarcastic sardine. Next thing you know, you’re Coco ‘effin Chanel with an anthem for female independence while stroking a furless cat with sagging skin and wrinkles:
“It’s probably not just by chance that I’m alone. It would be very hard for a man to live with me, unless he’s terribly strong. And if he’s stronger than I, I’m the one who can’t live with him. … I’m neither smart nor stupid, but I don’t think I’m a run-of-the-mill person. I’ve been in business without being a businesswoman, I’ve loved without being a woman made only for love. The two men I’ve loved, I think, will remember me, on earth or in heaven, because men always remember a woman who caused them concern and uneasiness. I’ve done my best, in regard to people and to life, without precepts, but with a taste for justice.”
At this point, my patience is as thin as a layer of onion. I’m doing my best not to succumb to alcohol abuse while watching another This Is Me trailer. But one thing may throw me off the edge for good — seeing Lopez in another fuckin’ music video dancing in another fuckin’ white wedding dress with a cutout heart near the crotch. For god’s sake Lopez, calm yer tits and control yourself, woman. Try and journey through singlehood walking on a bed of nails like everyone else for five minutes.