In 2002, Jennifer Lopez released her third album This Is Me...Then, a lovelorn record that captured the superstar at a crucial moment in her life. While its lead single was the mission statement “Jenny From the Block”, other tracks, like the glittery “I'm Glad” and the heartfelt “Dear Ben”, directly addressed her relationship with Ben Affleck, which was burning up the tabloids at that point. “This Is Me...Then really captured a moment in time where I fell in love with the love of my life,” Lopez tells Apple Music. “It's all right there on the record. I didn't even realise what was happening and what I was doing. It was just every day going from the set to the recording studio, doing the thing, being in love, him coming into the studio. It was such a special moment in time to have captured.” The inspiration for the album title came from a lengthy conversation with Affleck while the two were at the centre of an early-2000s paparazzi frenzy in Philadelphia, where they were filming the Kevin Smith-directed Jersey Girl. “I was like, 'I just don't know what to name this album. I just can't nail it, there's no title track,'” Lopez recalls. “[Affleck] was like, 'This is you right now. Everything that you're writing on this record that I've been seeing, this is you in this record, this moment. When you look back on the record, it'll be like, 'That was me then.'” This Is Me...Then represented artistic growth for Lopez, with emotional ballads that showed off her vocal and emotional range. “My experience with other artists is that when they're suffering, when they're in pain, they come out with this really crazy art. For me, it's the total opposite,” said Lopez. “When I'm in love is when I'm inspired the most. I was the most inspired then, and I have not made another record like that since then.” “Bennifer”, as Lopez and Affleck were known in the press, burned brightly, getting together in 2002—but their wedding in the fall of 2003 was postponed, and they broke up in early 2004. “Once we called off that wedding 20 years ago, it was the biggest heartbreak of my life,” Lopez says. “I honestly felt like I was going to die. It sent me on a spiral for the next 18 years where I just couldn't get it right. But now, 20 years later, it does have a happy ending. A 'that would never happen, we're not going to write that because nobody would believe it' ending.” Lopez is celebrating the 20th anniversary of This Is Me...Then with an expanded edition that features remixes by the likes of Paul Oakenfold and Ignorants. She's also celebrating her life coming full circle over the past two decades in a way that, she admits, “is a little bit like The Twilight Zone”. In 2023, Lopez will release This Is Me...Now, her first album in a decade. With songs like “Dear Ben Pt. II” and “Midnight Trip to Vegas”, it's directly referring to her rekindled relationship with Affleck, and showing how she's both evolved and stayed true to herself over the last two decades. “The whole message of the album Then is 'This love exists. This is a real love,'” said Lopez. “Now, the message is very much, 'If you were wondering if you have—like me at times—lost hope, and almost given up, don't. Because true love does exist and some things do last forever, and that's real.' I want to put that message out into the world, and that does take a lot of vulnerability. But I couldn't stop myself. Some parts of it scare me. And I think parts of it scare Ben, too. He's like, 'Oh, do you really want to say all this stuff?' And I'm like, 'I don't know how else to do it, baby.'”