Ben Affleck Blames Marriage To Jennifer Garner For His Alcoholism
"Part of why I started drinking was because I was trapped," Ben Affleck told The Howard Stern Show. He shared that if they had stuck out their marriage for longer, he felt he would still be drinking.
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“Part of why I started drinking was because I was trapped,” Ben Affleck told The Howard Stern Show. In a recent interview, the actor opened up about the end of his marriage to actress Jennifer Garner. He said that he was unhappy, that they were both trying to make the marriage work, but that he felt trapped. He explained that feeling trapped in his marriage led to his drinking, which led to alcoholism. He went on to say, “I was like, ‘I can’t leave because of my kids, but I’m not happy, what do I do?’ And what I did was [I] drank a bottle of scotch and fell asleep on the couch, which turned out not to be the solution.”
The actor felt trapped in his marriage to Jennifer Garner and the pair ultimately decided to get divorced. They were married from 2005 to 2018. He shared that if they had stuck out their marriage for longer, he felt he would still be drinking, and the marriage only would have gotten worse. He described the drinking as his way of attempting to cope with the pressures of feeling trapped in his marriage to Jennifer Garner. “We probably would’ve ended up at each other’s throats. I probably still would’ve been drinking,” Ben Affleck, explained on SiriusXM’s The Howard Stern Show.
He also talked about the impacts of fame on his divorce. At the time, rumors suggested that the pair split suddenly. He says that wasn’t how it happened. “Everything you read [in the news about the divorce] was bulls–t. The truth was we took our time, we made our decision … We grew apart,” Ben Affleck explained. “We had a marriage that didn’t work. This happens. She’s somebody I love and respect, but to whom I shouldn’t be married any longer.”
Ultimately, they divorced in 2018. That was when Ben Affleck went into rehab. He had a tough time for a while working through his recovery. He has said that it took him a year and a half to feel he’d changed. What he said ultimately made the difference for his recovery was his responsibility to his children. Ben Affleck said that his top responsibility is to them. When he saw how his drinking impacted them, it made a world of difference for him.
Today, Ben Affleck is reunited with a past love. He’s dating Jennifer Lopez again, someone he was dating prior to marrying Jennifer Garner. Their relationship has longtime fans curious. However, that curiosity is something that made him hesitate when their relationship rekindled. He understood that their relationship would be heavily covered in the news. His first time around with Jennifer Lopez, the two starred in movies together, he was in her music video, and they were on the covers of magazines everywhere. His new relationship would be heavily covered by outlets once again. And what would that do to his children? In the end, he decided to start his new relationship with Lopez, but he’s aware that his celebrity impacts them.
Ben Affleck has been very open about his struggles and recovery from alcoholism in recent years. He’s shared that it impacted his personal relationships and his career. According to past interviews, his drinking became a major problem around the time he was filming Justice League. Today, fans are waiting to see Robert Pattinson in The Batman, directed by Matt Reeves. This was originally a project Affleck was supposed to direct himself. Following his high-pressure Batman role, he wasn’t sure about taking on this next project, though he had made some progress on it. Eventually, he showed someone the script. He recalled the moment for The NY Times, saying, “They said, ‘I think the script is good. I also think you’ll drink yourself to death if you go through what you just went through again.'”
He needed some time to recover. Now, his career is picking up again. He recently appeared in The Last Duel with Matt Damon. He worked with director George Clooney for The Tender Bar. And he’s set to play Batman again in The Flash.
