Watch: Ben Affleck Reveals How His Kids Reacted to Story of Them Trolling Him
Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck didn’t set out to be a shining example of post-split possibility, but here they are.
Not that their kids would call them experts or anything.
But Garnerâwho almost starred in Affleck’s latest dual-threat effort Animals, which is streaming on Netflix and was originally going to co-star Matt Damon instead of the film’s directorâhave now been exes for longer than they were married. And, while they were always on the same page about putting their childrenâViolet, 20, Seraphina, 17, and Samuel, 14âfirst, it wasn’t easy to put everything aside to achieve that goal.
However, they eventually did, and now you may as well call them consciously uncoupled.
âI see the way my kids dote on their dad and Iâm happy for them,â Garner wrote in her June 21 Father’s Day tribute. âTo love and be loved by a great dad is a gift. Happy Fatherâs Day to all of the dads and to the kids of dads, too.â
Married for almost 10 years before announcing in June 2015 that they were separated and planning to divorce, the pair started looking so at ease on family outings that they sparked reconciliation rumors after Affleck and Jennifer Lopez started divorce proceedings in 2024.
Nor was it the first time that hopes were high for a resurgence of the O.G. Ben and Jen, the pair who hightailed it to the Bahamas with their kids when the split news broke having set the tone early on about the importance of operating as a team, even when it’s really hard.
Which, from the outside, can sometimes look a lot like two people still in love.
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“Happy Fatherâs Day to 3 peopleâs favorite landing spot,” Garner wrote in tribute to Affleck in 2025, posting a throwback photo of the Argo star holding one of their babies.
Case in point, Affleck and Garner are very supportive of each otherâhe told Variety ahead of Animal‘s Oct. 9 premiere that he’s hoping to find a project to work on with herâand remain close after going through a lot to get to this place in their relationship.
“You have to be smart about what you can and canât handle, and I could not handle what was ‘out there,'” Garner, 54, told Marie Claire U.K. earlier this year, referring to what was said about their split when it was happening. But it wasn’t the stories that were hard, she continued, “The fact of it is what was hard. The actual breaking up of a family is what was hard. Losing a true partnership and friendship is what was hard.”
But, she noted, “Time is the opportunity to heal. Time is the opportunity to forgive, to move on and to find a new way to be friends.â
Though even now, their situation still has its pluses and minuses when it comes to parenting under respective roofs.
âI become mom and dad; he becomes dad and mom,â Garner acknowledged to Bustle in February. âYou kind of canât help it, right? Because you don’t have the benefit of both sides of the yin and yang being in the same house. And so you have to have a bit of both in the way that you parent. There’s a little bit of loss in that, but there’s also something gained in that.”
Jennifer Garner/Instagram
Affleck, 54, called himself (not for the first time) “really lucky” to have a “really good co-parent and partner” in Garner, telling GQ in January 2025Â that she’s “wonderful and great and we work together well.”
And Garnerâwho, incidentally, has been dating boyfriend John Miller since 2018âhas acknowledged how her perspective has shifted regarding what she still has with Affleck, versus what she lost in the divorce.
“When our kids get married, weâll dance, I know that now,â she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2021, referring to how she told Vanity Fair in 2016 that her dream of dancing with the love of her life at her daughter’s wedding had been dashed. âWeâll boogaloo and have a great time. I donât worry about that anymore.”
By then, Garner had proven time and again that their family was paramount, and that whatever she needed to do to help Affleck for their children’s sakeâsuch as take him to rehab in 2018âshe would do.
“The main thing is these kids,” she told Vanity Fair in 2016, her first post-split interview, “and we’re completely in line with what we hope for them.” And no matter how she was feeling, she noted, “if you see your kids love someone so purely and wholly, then youâre going to be friends with that person.”
And though Violet, Seraphina and Samuel may consider their mom “fully cringe,” as The Last Thing He Told Me star quipped on the Jennifer Hudson Show in February, Affleck would beg to differ.
“Jen is a superhero mom,” the Oscar winner gushed to E! News in 2016. “She is an amazing mother.” And when it came to the kids, “We try our best, we put them first and that’s what we do.”
And in 2020, Affleck told People, “When you have children with somebody, you’re connected to them forever…Our marriage didn’t work, and that’s difficult. Both of us really believe that it’s important for kids to see their parents respect one another and get along, whether they’re together or not.”
But while the public reverence Affleck continued to show for his ex made some people wonder why they couldn’t just get back together already, the Gone Girl star has made it pretty clear that ship has sailed.
“We had a marriage that didn’t work. This happens,” Affleck told Howard Stern in December 2021. “She’s somebody I love and respect, but to whom I shouldn’t be married any longer. We did it amicably. We did our best. Did we have moments of tension? Did we have disagreements over custody? Was stuff difficult for us? Did we get angry? Yes, but fundamentally it was always underpinned with a respect.”
And ultimately, he didn’t want what was going on in his and Garner’s household before the divorce to “be the model that our kids see of marriage.”
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Mind you, by the time he talked to Stern, Affleck had reunited with Lopez almost 20 years after their first engagement ended, proving that anything was possible. Almost as quickly, however, they demonstrated why do-overs aren’t always a good idea and their marriage ended after two years.
But on the bright side, Garner-Affleck shippers had new fuel for that fire.Â
Which even Garner gets, having rooted for other celebrity exes in the past. “When Jen Aniston and Brad Pitt broke up,” she told Vanity Fair in 2016, “I was dying to see something that said they were getting back together.”
All the joint graduations, school plays, holidays, baseball games and paintball outings in the world may not ever be a sign of Affleck and Garner giving romance another go, but the way they’ve made this chapter of their lives work for their children has always been worthy of applause.
For more proof that all is not ever really lost, see more of the friendliest celebrity exes:
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(Originally published April 17, 2025, at 5 a.m. PT)
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