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While Jennifer Lopez has always had a very successful professional life, things in her personal life haven’t always been as perfect.
The singer spent 10 years married to fellow artist Marc Anthony, but toward the end of their marriage--which lasted from 2004 to 2014, her husband told her something that “broke her down completely.”
Within Lopez’s new book, True Love, she recalls a time when her personal life was crumbling as her professional life was skyrocketing. At the time, her song and video were in the top spot, she was being celebrated by People magazine, and she was a judge on the No. 1 show in the country, American Idol.
“Things couldn’t have been going better for me professionally,” she wrote. “People magazine named me it’s most beautiful woman in the world, my record was number one, my video was number one, and I was on the number-one television show in America. I felt like I was on top of the world.”
Even with all this positivity in her life, Lopez’s marriage was in a different place. That’s when she revealed what Anthony said that completely shattered her.
According to Jennifer, her husband was venting about things in their marriage that were bothering him. At one point, he admitted that he wasn’t happy. Lopez says this hurt her, because she had been trying so hard to keep him happy. On top of that, she was also trying her best to be a good mother to their children, Max and Emme.
“In the midst of all this excitement and outpouring of appreciation and love, the bubble was burst with three simple words: ‘I’m not happy,’” Lopez reveals in her book. “Marc was in the middle of venting to me about things between us that had been bothering him, and I was sitting there trying to figure out where he was going with it.”
“Then he said it again: ‘I’m not happy.’ I’m here because we have a family, because we’re trying to keep it together. But I’m not happy,” the singer wrote.
That’s when Lopez says she started crying uncontrollably, because she felt like she failed at trying to make everyone around her happy. On the bright side, the singer says her discussion with Anthony ended up acting as a wakeup call, helping her begin to realize that she never even considered her own happiness.
“It was like a light bulb finally turned on in my head: What sense did it make to keep suppressing my own feelings of what was missing in the relationship?” she wrote. “How long did I need to keep trying to make someone happy who was telling me flat-out that he wasn’t? My own happiness and sense of self-worth still depended on how happy he was. So, when Marc stated so clearly that he wasn’t happy, it broke me down completely.”
That moment of sadness and feeling broken down is what ultimately taught Lopez what a healthy relationship is supposed to be like, which helped her become stronger in the future
