Do celebrities use social media the way the rest of us do — marvelling at colleagues’ abs, replying to every single Instagram story after two glasses of wine, looking at unaffordable kitchens — or do they know, like Oppenheimer in the desert, precisely what effect their pressing that “like” button might have?
Jennifer Lopez has this week created just as much silent white heat online as at Los Alamos by liking on Instagram — that is, selecting the heart icon beneath an image to indicate you enjoyed looking at it/fervently identify ideologically with it/are friends with or pity the person who put it up — a post from a relationship coach named Lenna Marsak.
“You cannot build a healthy relationship with someone,” her slides declare, “who … lacks integrity and emotional safety; doesn’t respect your time; lacks effective communication skills; doesn’t know what they want.”
Babe, we’ve all been there.
Yet what the 54-year-old actress, singer and gym-guilt in human form has detonated is further speculation as to the health of her marriage to Ben Affleck. Their “Bennifer” status was the modern fairytale that a generation forged in Heat magazine took to mean there was such a thing as true love and that history does repeat itself, first as tragedy and then on yachts.
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The couple met in 2001 on the set of the universally panned Gigli, got engaged a year later, postponed their wedding in 2003 and split up in 2004. Twenty years on — after marriages and children with other people — they did what many high-street retailers have done to improve flagging sales: gave things a Y2K rebrand.
Alas, since their 2022 elopement to Las Vegas, the relationship is looking almost as shaky as Lopez’s two previous two-ish-year marriages (to the Cuban waiter Ojani Noa in 1997-98 and the back-up dancer Cris Judd from 2001-03 — that’s right, about the same time as Bennifer 1.0). Affleck, 51, is rumoured to have moved out and — a telltale sign, this — was recently doorstepped by men with cameras outside his house looking slightly less than happy about it.
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Lopez’s solo appearance at the Met Gala last week really cranked up the rumour mill, however, given that when the couple attended the event in 2021 they were so loved-up that they passed time on the red carpet snogging through their Covid masks. This year, Lopez’s solitary naked dress turn was the first suggestion that Jenny from the block might soon be Jenny with the divorce papers.
Then again, who knows? While turning up at a party alone in see-through clothes is often the sign a marriage is in trouble, it is par for the course when you are Jennifer Lopez and the effect of your physique in a plunging Versace dress back in 2000 was to herald the invention of Google’s image search function.
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There is still the Instagram post, though, and that carefully — or not so carefully — bestowed little heart. Leaving aside for a moment how it might have felt for Marsak, a woman whose 7,500 followers make her a relative small fry on the scene, to notice that JLo (252 million followers) had casually dropped her a “like”, it’s possible that the singer was just feeling a bit peeved or did it by accident. The Tory London mayoral candidate Susan Hall didn’t really mean to “like” that post about Enoch Powell, remember.
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In the tumultuous ten years or so that it has been with us, Instagram has changed not just celebrity behaviour, but also how many of us “do” relationships, from “soft launching” new partners on 24-hour-only Stories before deciding whether they make the more permanent “grid” to deleting every last trace of them should things take a turn for the terminal.
Perhaps publicly liking therapy-speak posts in a pass-agg fashion is just the new version of rolling your eyes when you arrive at the barbecue to indicate that you argued in the car en route. Or perhaps this really is the end for Bennifer — for the next 20 years, anyway.
