Jennifer Lopez went through a difficult time when she realized she had to divorce her ex-husband Marc Anthony. But there was one song she turned to that made her transition back to the single life a bit easier.
Jennifer Lopez needed this song after she and Marc Anthony divorce
Lopez has been very open about how she dealt with her divorce from Anthony. Although she’d been married before, it seemed like her relationship with the “Rain Over Me” singer would go the distance. The two exchanged wedding vows in 2004 and were married for ten years before going their separate ways. As is usually the case with divorces, the Hustlers star described the process as a heartbreaking experience. But Lopez’s resilience prevented the break-up from taking as much of a toll as it could’ve.
“I had to turn that into something better,” she once told Hollywood Life about the split. “I thought, ‘I don’t want to just survive it, I want to come out better than that.’ I didn’t want to be the woman who stayed in bed for months.”
Lopez was able to heal through her music. She especially credited the song “Dance Again” for helping her recovery. The song was on Lopez’s album Dance Again…The Hits, and was an upbeat pop record that motivated the singer to persevere.
“After Marc and I decided to divorce,” she said in a 2013 interview with Glamour. “I came across this song Dance Again’ while working on my album. It became a kind of mantra: You will live. You will love. You will dance again. I needed that song.”
She first heard a version of the song that was recorded by Enrique Iglesias. But she immediately felt that the record was meant for her more than it was meant for him.
“I had to beg and beg Enrique to give it to me. I told him, ‘That’s my song.’ And finally, he gave in,” she said. “‘Dance Again’ became my anthem…an expression of what I needed to do at that time in my life and for what I was taking on with [my career]. It was a beautiful metaphor that became my reality.”
The song inspired Lopez’s “Dance Again” world tour. Although she once got booed in Boston during her travels, it was still an overall cathartic experience for the actor.
Performing brought Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony closer together
Lopez asserted that it wasn’t easy for her and Anthony to be on the same page again. Perhaps one of the hardest parts of her and Anthony’s break-up was having to reconcile with her ex-husband. This was especially difficult since the two had kids, so they’d have to be a part of each other’s lives one way or another.
“When my marriage [to Anthony] ended, it was not easy to find forgiveness,” she once told W (via Today). “It wasn’t the dream that I had hoped for, and it would have been easier to fan the flames of resentment, disappointment and anger. But Marc is the father of my children, and that’s never going away. So, I have to work to make things right. And that is, by far, the hardest work I do.”
An unexpected remedy for their relationship was performing together. A few years after their divorce, Lopez would work alongside Anthony for her first Spanish album Como Ama una Mujer. But the surprising side-effect of their collaboration was the impact it had on their friendship.
“It actually kind of repaired certain parts of our relationship that had been fractured from our marriage and our divorce and it kind of made us friends again,” Lopez said in a 2016 interview with Spotify (via Billboard). “Like, because when we first started working together it’s how we met, we met working. And so we remembered that like, oh right, we connect on this level of music. And we have that. And that’s what the album came out of.”
