It’s been an emotional week for Ben Affleck.
First, he revealed how he ” regrets ” his divorce from Jennifer Garner and now, he even shared the touching letter he wrote to her during a hard point of his life.
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There was a time when things were simpler.
This was back in the far off year of 2004.
We all laughed when Ashlee Simpson was caught lip-syncing on SNL , we all had a good time watching White Chicks and of course, there was Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner.
Their relationship just made sense.
And in a world that was fresh off the heels of the doozy that was 2001, we needed something to make sense.
They first became friends when they shot Pearl Harbor .
And got closer during “Daredevil.”
However, they really started dating in mid-2004. It was a grand and beautiful relationship, two of Hollywood’s biggest stars getting together was something we could all be happy for.
And then, they got married.
It was the wedding of the century.
Yes, it was a private Turks and Caicos ceremony, but when we heard about it our hearts were melting.
But then, tragedy struck. Ten years after the wedding, we heard the worst news ever.
The two were getting divorced.
“What?” we asked “How could they do this?” It was outrageous! It was unfair!
But oh, was it true. And since, we have lived in a post Affleck-Garner world.
A much darker world.
Earlier this week, Ben Affleck dropped a bombshell on the world:
He announced that he “regrets” his divorce from ex-wife, Jennifer Garner.
The pair split in June 2015 after 10 years of marriage.
They have three kids together, daughter Violet, 14, daughter Seraphina, 11, and son Samuel, 7.
The actor’s shocking reveal about his previous marriage came during a recent interview with “The New York Times.”
He began by talking about his new movie, The Way Back , in which he plays a high school basketball coach who ruins his marriage and lands himself in rehab.
Given the alcohol addiction the “Batman” actor has faced over the years, the character hits close to home for him.
This caused him to open up about how his own drinking has caused his marriage with Garner to crumble.
“The biggest regret of my life is this divorce. Shame is really toxic,” he said.
“There is no positive by-product of shame. It’s just stewing in a toxic, hideous feeling of low self-worth and self-loathing.”
He continued:
“It’s not particularly healthy for me to obsess over the failures—the relapses—and beat myself up. I have certainly made mistakes. I have certainly done things that I regret. But you’ve got to pick yourself up, learn from it, learn some more, try to move forward.”
He also discussed how his alcohol addiction played a negative role in his marriage.
“I drank relatively normally for a long time,” he said.
“What happened was that I started drinking more and more when my marriage was falling apart. This was 2015, 2016. My drinking, of course, created more marital problems.”
The actor got even more candid about this topic in a new interview with “Good Morning America’s” Diane Sawyer.
He shared the note that he wrote for Jen following his infamous October 2019 relapse.
The note read:
“What I want to say publicly and privately is, ‘Thank you. Thank you for being thoughtful, considerate, responsible, and a great mom and person.'”
He then talked more about the divorce with Diane and even got emotional when doing so.
“I never thought that I was gonna get divorced. I didn’t want to get divorced. I didn’t want to be a divorced person. I really didn’t want to be a split family with my children,” he admitted.
“And it upset me because it meant I wasn’t who I thought I was. And that was so painful and so disappointing in myself.”
During his interview with Sawyer, Affleck revealed that he had seen some of the viral TMZ footage from his October 2019 relapse.
“I know what it looks like to be drunk. I don’t need to watch any more of it.”
The footage showed him intoxicated and stumbling out of Kimpton La Peer Hotel after attending the UNICEF Masquerade Ball.
Sadly, this happened after he celebrated one year of sobriety.
Given all this, his letter to Jen was the least he could do.
After all, she was a constant support for him, even after their divorce.
“She wants Ben to be in the kids’ lives. That means dealing with things she isn’t happy about,” a source revealed to Us Weekly at the time.
But doing so meant laying down the law on the drinking, since the kids are always her top priority.
“Jen’s major sticking point is that Ben needs to be sober — and truthful about it. There’s no wiggle room on that as far as his relationship with his kids goes.”
Thankfully, Ben appears to feel the same way as she does.
“I have to be the man I wanna be at this point,” he said during his Good Morning America interview.
“I don’t have any more room for failure of that kind.”
