Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck’s Relationship Timeline and Photos

March 2003: In his Vanity Fair feature, Affleck said that Lopez made him a better person and he was excited to marry her.

“Jennifer is a really wonderful, fabulous woman, smart and interesting,” he told the publication. “Spending time with her makes me a better person and a happier person. She impresses me every day. It feels better to me to be with her than without her.”

He added: “Jen and I want to get married for the reason everyone else does: we fell in love. I’m in love; I want to have a family; and she’s the only person I’ve ever met who made me entertain the thought of doing that.”

The “Gone Girl” star said that he didn’t understand the public’s obsession with the relationship, but had an idea why people were so interested.

“I think it has to do with race and class, the fact that I’m white and she’s Puerto Rican,” he said. “That’s what’s underneath, although nobody says it, because it’s not politically correct.”

Affleck also said that people made incorrect assumptions about Lopez’s romantic life because she was “characterized as oversexed.”

“Jen has had fewer boyfriends than your average high-school junior,” he said. “In the physical sense, she’s extremely chaste.”

He added: “She’s had a much simpler, more easily explainable, more clean romantic history than I have. She can tell the whole story in 15 minutes, whereas I always preface the whole story with ‘It was complicated …'”

Affleck also said that race was a factor, because “there’s a kind of language that’s used about her — the spicy Latina, the tempestuous diva. She’s characterized as oversexed.”

“She’s a deeply misunderstood woman, in my opinion,” he said.