Jennifer Lopez, 45, feels so strongly about the power of true love to transform your life, that she’s written a new book called True Love (Penguin, $17.97). JLo learned the hard way that true love isn’t what she had thought for most of her life , she said in an exclusive interview with HollywoodLife.com.
After three marriages that ended in divorce, including her union with Marc Anthony, which she believed would be “forever, Jennifer came to the realization that “something’s wrong, something’s not working in my relationship.”
She hit rock bottom she wrote in True Love, one day when she had a full on meltdown and thought she was going crazy, while she was on set prepping for a L’Oreal ad shoot.
Sobbing, she confessed to her manger, Benny Medina and mom Guadalupe, that “I don’t think I can be with Marc anymore.”
It was the realization that her fairytale marriage had crashed and burned, that set off her journey of self discovery.
“We’re taught from very little that this fairytale guy is going to come along and he’s going to save you and he’s going to be on a white horse.”
And you’re going to live happily ever after — that’s when you’re going to live happily ever,” Jennifer told Hollywoodlife.com.
“So you’re waiting for someone to bring you your happiness. It’s so twisted.”
Instead Jennifer says, and it’s so true, “You got to be happy on your own.”
She admits that she “used to be a hopeless romantic and now I realized that the love that I’d been searching for, was inside of me.”
Jennifer explains that she used to laugh at the idea that she had low self esteem. But she came to realize, she writes in True Love that “my sense of self worth depended on someone else’s validation.”
The message that she wants you to take away she told Hollywoodlife.com, is “be good on your own… that’s all you need. if someone wants to come and join in your fun, that’s fine ,but you don’t need that.”
It was a tough lesson for Jennifer to learn. She confessed that in her marriage to Marc “I had been suppressing my own feelings of what was wrong in the relationship for so long and just trying to be the best that I could be and I realized that my feelings were important too. When he said that he wasn’t happy, it was like a light bulb, I mean you’re not happy and I’m not happy, why are we make believing here. it doesn’t make sense.”
Jennifer had that ultimate a ha moment, “It was so evident that it wasn’t about him, it was about me not loving myself enough to say this doesn’t feel right. It (the divorce) was actually a blessing in disguise, as painful as it was.”
So HollywoodLifers — there you have it from Jennifer Lopez herself — the most important love you can have is for yourself. And without that, you can’t truly be loved by anyone else. You can’t depend on a man or anyone else to “make” you happy. You have to be happy with you.
To read more about Jennifer’s inspiring journey and to get more of her advice on loving yourself, get your own copy of True Love. I loved it! Watch our video interview above.
— Bonnie Fuller
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