12 Things We Learned From Jennifer Lopez About Being Single, Teaching Her Kids and Who Her Secret Crush Is
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On Thursday night at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, the Today Show’s Hoda Kotb interviewed Jennifer Lopez about her new book True Love, her world tour, motherhood, and the burning question everyone in the audience was dying to know: how life has been going since her very public divorce from Marc Anthony.
“You can ask me anything!” said Lopez at the start of the program. And she wasn’t kidding. Below are a few of the juiciest takeaways we gathered from her interview. But despite all the dish and all the drama, one thing is clear: Jennifer Lopez has never felt better or shined any brighter that she does right now.
1. She is happy Marc Anthony is getting remarried. There’s no bad blood with her ex, explained Lopez. “He is getting married soon and I couldn’t be happier. What we had is in the past.”
2. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t hard to let go. Kotb asked Lopez what the hardest part of the breakup was. She said, “We had a family. We really had planned on being together for forty or fifty years, and I had to give up that dream. It was really tough.”
3. She is perfectly content being single (for now). “I’m not going to wait for someone to bring me my happiness. I am happy and whole on my own, and it took me a long time to realize that. I do still believe in the fairytale. I just believe you have to be whole first, and I wasn’t.”
4. Lopez is an avid runner, in more ways than one. She’s been a huge runner since the age of thirteen. “I always push myself along. And that’s helped me professionally, which is great. But in relationships it’s not. You have to take your time.”
5. Enrique Iglesias owned the single “Dance Again,” but Lopez convinced him to let her have it. Lopez and Iglesias worked together in the studio in the early days of her separation from Anthony. “It was Enrique’s song, he owned it!” And although Enrique wanted to sing it as a duet, Lopez insisted on singing it solo. “I told him, ‘I need to sing this, I need to dance again!’”
6. Her children don’t know they’re famous. Lopez’s twins are “getting to the age where they are just starting to figure it out … that there’s something different from the other moms at school.”
7. But it’s important she teaches them good manners. “I think it’s important for them to see me work hard, to see me carry my own plate to the sink after dinner.” Kotb asked if Lopez actually bussed her own dishes after a meal. Joked Lopez: “I do, sometimes.”
8. If her children want to be famous, she might make them think twice. They’ve got to get into it because they are passionate about it, not because they want the fame, she said. “But here’s what I know about artists. There’s no way to stop them.”
9. In another life, Lopez would probably be a fashion designer. “If I wasn’t doing this, I would still do something creative. Probably in clothing design. Being in fashion is a big part of my life.”
10. Matt Lauer is a big fan. When Lopez visited the Today Show earlier this week, as Hoda Kotb explained, he ran out to meet Lopez, “with his jaw on the floor.” After Lopez left the set, he told Kotb, “You know, she’s my screensaver.”
11. Lopez now gives the best breakup advice: “You will live again, you will love again, and you will dance again.”
12. She has never felt better. “I refuse to let heartache or pain, an inevitable part of life, I refuse to let it diminish my soul or change how amazing I feel I can be. I told Marc I wanted to survive this divorce. I want to come out a better person. And I have.”
