We have all witnessed the folie à deux, the kind of relationship in which high drama is mistaken for passionate love and both parties find themselves in the limbo state of being unable to function either together or apart. Some of us may even have had more direct experience of this particular romantic phenomenon.
But as the world continues to absorb the pearl-clutching news that Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez (aka Bennifer) are divorcing after a two-year marriage that came two decades after their first engagement was called off, it may be an appropriate moment to ask what compels people to go back to a failed relationship – to return, as it were, to the scene of the crying.
Relationship counsellor Nicola Foster believes it’s a deep-seated human instinct to want to complete “unfinished business”.
“There’s a tenacity in us that says maybe this time it will be different, maybe this time the burning need that was not previously met somehow will be,” she says.
Almost always, it’s the triumph of hope over expectation – but romantics are big on hope. More realistically, what calls lovers back is the drama, the action, the intense feelings, even if most of them are dark. Other relationships can appear tepid and dull by comparison with one that is serially making up after breaking up.
“One of the reasons I became a relationship therapist,” says Foster, “is that I was hooked on a dramatic idea of romance. I loved novels like Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary.”
In both those 19th-century classics, the married heroines embark on disastrous love affairs that end in tragedy. Foster says she was enthralled by a notion of love in which the perfect prince would answer her needs. The problem, she came to realise, was not just that no such prince existed, but also that she should be addressing those needs herself.
A further problem is that self-improvement, like improving a relationship, requires work, and work is not a word we associate with love. Indeed, we tend to see love as escape from work, a liberating place of truth and beauty. As Lopez put it after her 2022 wedding in Las Vegas to Affleck: “Love is beautiful. Love is kind. And it turns out love is patient.”
Love, it now seems, was far more patient when they were estranged than reunited. You can maintain a fantasy about someone when they’re not there, but it’s almost impossible to do so when you live, eat and share a bathroom with them. OK, Hollywood superstars almost certainly have separate bathrooms, but the point is that unrealistic yearnings can’t withstand too much mundane familiarity.
Affleck and Lopez are certainly not the first couple to revisit a romance that had previously not worked out, though it’s hard to think of anyone who’s ever looked unhappier in the process. The long faces may have had a lot to do with unwanted paparazzi attention, but celebrity-watchers of what is referred to as Bennifer 2.0 have long maintained that it was a marriage of two people whose mutual attraction far outweighed their compatibility.
In this respect, they hark back to an even more famous and tempestuous couple, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who married and divorced twice, living their lives in an operatic emotional register that see-sawed between magnificent gestures of devotion and miserable displays of despair.
It was a combustible romance, ignited by huge quantities of alcohol and the celebrity magnifying glass, but its underlying dynamic, says Foster, is a common one. “There’s one person, Taylor, who wants more and is seeking reassurance, and the other, Burton, who feels validated by that role and yet wants to pull away and gain more autonomy.”
It was a coupling that had everything except stability. They began an affair on the set of Cleopatra in 1963, an overblown epic that itself depicts the impassioned but volatile relationship between the eponymous queen and Roman general Mark Antony. Arguably, Burton and Taylor reached their cinematic highpoint in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a film about a married couple who loathe, and yet are utterly dependent on, each other. According to their biographer, Roger Lewis, it was “their entire marriage, crammed into a single picture”.
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When the marriage inevitably crashed in 1974, they remarried the following year, and divorced again the year after that. Both continued to refer to the other as the love of their live. Were they just as prone to the romantic mythology of their relationship as their adoring fans?
Professionals tend to look at childhood when seeking the cause of recurring behavioural pathologies. In the case of Taylor, a child star, and Burton, one of 13 children born to an alcoholic father and a mother who died when the future film star was just two, there was no shortage of red flags.
“These kinds of relationships often conform to attachment theory, and the fear of abandonment,” says Simy Jewell, a psychotherapist who counsels couples. “In my experience, the romantic pattern starts early, and it’s repeated. It might be the first dramatic relationship at university that becomes a model for what comes later.”
Of course, there is another, rather haunting, possibility. The reason some couples can’t move on from a break-up is because, deep down, they really are right for each other, and if only they could skip over their footling differences, transcendent bliss with their soulmate awaits.
Neither Jewell nor Foster definitively rules out that eventuality, but they haven’t seen much evidence of it in their counselling rooms. Couples can successfully get back together, says Foster, but only if they’re willing to address their problems. “Differences are healthy – there has to be some ongoing pushing and pulling – but they need to be acknowledged.”
Perhaps, then, Affleck and Lopez were meant to be together but just never quite grasped what being together meant. Surely only a cold-hearted pragmatist would discount Bennifer 3.0.