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Ojani Noa, Jennifer Lopez’s first husband, has a message for the singer as she and Ben Affleck work towards finalizing the end of her fourth marriage.
“Stay single for a while, take 12 months off,” Noa, 50, said in an interview with the Daily Mail.
“If she meets someone new, maybe keep it private and not get married again.
“She has an amazing career and she’s a hard-working, beautiful woman, but when you’re with someone, you have to spend quality time with them and not think about being on camera.”
Ojani Noa also says he sympathizes with Ben Affleck after his own experience being in a relationship with the pop star.
“I’ve met him and he’s an amazing guy. Even though they’re both in the spotlight, you can tell that he’s a really private man,” he said about Affleck.
He also understand why sometimes Ben Affleck looked so downcast.
“I can tell you in my own experience, we would have disagreements in the car and then 20 minutes later, we’d have to sit and pretend everything was fine,’ he said.
“But you can only pretend so much. When we were going through hell and going out as a couple, I was in a bad mood too. Because I knew inside we were not good.”
Noa also tells a story similar to what was reported when Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez broke up after getting engaged.
“I never looked at another woman when I was with Jennifer,” he said. “But I felt like I was the bad guy.
“[Her people] wanted to make her look good because of everything that was coming out – the movie, the album, and they didn’t want any bad publicity.
“They made it sound like I didn’t want to be with her and it was the opposite.”
While Ojani Noa says he harbors no hard feelings towards Jennifer Lopez, he did add, “I was the first, the pioneer. I was there at the beginning of her career supporting her, dealing with her anxieties and insecurities. I was a really good husband because I believe in marriage. When we divorced, I was heartbroken. I feel when she got what she wanted, I was no longer needed.”
One rumor about Bennifer is that their trouble started as early as their honeymoon. Noa believes he could see the cracks in the relationship already forming then as well.
“In some honeymoon pictures,” he said. “[Ben] looks like he wants to be there with her, but just not photographed. I can understand that. The wedding is for everybody but the honeymoon is a private moment. To me, it seemed like she was saying: ‘Look at us – we’re on honeymoon! [Let’s] have everybody see us.’”
Near the end of his relationship with Lopez, Noa said he told her, “You have to be private. You can’t be real in a relationship if you’re always being photographed.”